Our Inheritence in The Great Pyramide by Piazza Smyth

(ft
^
OUR INHERITANCE IN
THE GREAT PYRAMID

NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION
INCLUDING ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT DISCOVERIES UP TO
THE PRESENT TIME
\i:- BY
C^'^PIAZZI SMYTH, F.R.S.E., f.r.a.s.

ASTRONOMER ROYAL FOR SCOTLAND
"because that which may bk known of god is manifest in them;

FOR GOD hath SHEWKD IT UNTO THEM. FOR THE INVISIBLE THINGS OF HIM
FROM THE CREATION OF THE WORLD ARE CLEARLY SEEN, BEING UNDERSTOOD
BY THE THINGS THAT ARE MADE."
Romans i., 19, 20
W. ISBISTER & CO.

56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON
1874
" David, in a choice of evils similar to these, said, ' Let me .âll into the hands of
the Lord, for very great are his mercies ; but let me not fall into the hand of man'
(1 Chron. xxi. 13). The people of England know what it is to experience somewhat
of the latter calamity ; and though they are bound to acknowledge that their long-
protracted griefs are to be preferred to the short but severe sufferings which the
nations of the Continent had to endure, they must feel, after all, that it is a deep
afliiction which many have had to bear. But let them with Faith and Patience endure
their troubles a little longer. Their redemption draweth nigh."
John Tayloe's Wealth the Name and Number of the Beast, p. 149.
TO THE MEMORY OF THE LATE
JOHN TAYLOE,
GOWER STREET, LONDON,
(departed JULY, 1864)
AUTHOR OF
WHY WAS AND WHO

'
'
' THE GREAT PYRAMID ; IT BUILT, BUII.T IT '?
THIS FURTHER ATTEMPT TO APPLY ACTUAL
SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATION
TO TEST HIS
MOST MOMENTOUS THEORY,
AND MOST PRECIOUS DISCOVERY OF THE AGE FOR ALL MANKIND
IF TRUE,
IS DEDICATED BY
THE FRIEND OF HIS FEW LAST YEARS,
BUT ADMIRER OF ALL HIS LONG AND EARNEST CHRISTIAN LIFE,
PIAZZI SMYTH.
Edinburgh, 187^.
)
" THE GREAT, THE MIGHTY GOD, THE LORD OF HOSTS, IS HIS XAME,
GREAT IN COUNSEL, AND MIGHTY IN WORK: . WHICH HAPT SET SIGNS
. . .
AN3 WONDERS IN THE LAND OF EGYPT, EVKN UNTO THIS DAY."

—
JEREMIAH xxxii. 18 20.
PREFACE.
TX7HEN the late worthy John Taylor, of Gower Street,
London (originally of Bakewell, Derbyshire) pub-

lished, first his larger work entitled " The Great Pyra-
mid ; why was it built, and who built it ?" in 1859 ;
and afterwards, in 1864, his smaller pamphlet which

he called " The Battle of the Standards (of Linear
Measure) : the ancient of four thousand years, against
the modern of the last fifty years — the less perfect of
the two," —he opened up for archaeology a purer,
nobler, more important pathway to light than that
study had ever enjoyed before.

But Academic Archaeology did not accept it ; and
meanwhile some portions of the new pathway were so
little removed from much of my own scientific profes-
sional occupations, that I felt it something like a public
duty to examine into the foundation of Mr. Taylor's

theory as rigidly and extensively as I could, though by
home work only, at first ; and my publication of 18G4
{i.e., the first edition of the present book) contained
the findings so arrived at. Findings, in many points

viii PREFACE.
confirmatory of the principal thread of Mr. Taylor's

chief discovery ; but exhibiting in the general literature
of the subject a lamentable deficiency in the numerical
data required for solid investigation ; and which data

of measure, nothing but practical examination at the
place could hope to supply.
How, when no one else would volunteer, for the
sake of Great Pyramid knowledge alone, and only one

gentleman* in all the kingdom, throughout official and
private circles alike, kindly tendered a subscription
(£50) towards the expenses, —how, I say, my Wife

and self determined to sail for Egypt ; and did, very
soon after Mr. Taylor's death, through four months of

residence on the Pyramid hill itself, employ a large
variety of scientific instruments, in obtaining many
measures of the mighty monument, some of them to
far more accuracy than had ever been attempted before,
and others descending to numerous details unnoticed
by former observers, — all this was described by me,

first in abstract to the Rojâl Society, Edinburgh, in
April, 1866 ; and afterwards (in 1867) at much more

length to the Avorld in general in my three-volume
book, " Life and Work at the Great Pyramid in 1865." f
That last publication undoubtedly helped to spread
a knowledge both of the importance of the question at
issue, and the only means for solving it : especially
as against the modern hieroglyphic scholars ; who,
* Andrew Coventry, Esq., of 27, Moray Place, Edinburgh.
t Pages 1,653; plateaSG. PublisJ.ei by Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh.

PREFACE. ix
whatever their learning may be concerning other Egyp-

tian buildings, have never troubled themselves to
examine the Great Pyramid in the manner now

required, and remain singularly and perseveringly
ignorant of its mathematical proportions and mecha-

nical features. Indeed, these literary Egyptologists are
rather angered than otherwise to hear that such exact
data of scientific measure, when collected by others

than themselves, tend to establish that the Great Pyra-
mid, though in Egypt is not of Egypt ; and though
built in the earliest ages of man upon earth, far before
all histor}^, was yet prophetically intended to subserve
a high purpose for these days in which we live and the

coming days. That it, the Great Pyramid, has never
been oven remotely understood yet by any race of men,
though it has been a standing riddle guessed at by all
•
of them in their successive ages; but that it is able
nevertheless to tell its own story and explain its mission

most unmistakably : not indeed by reference to, or use
of, any written language, whether hieroglyphic or vulgar,
—but by aid of the mathematical and physical science
of TRodern times : a means fore-ordained both for pre-
venting the parable being read too soon in the history

of the world, and for insuring its being correctly read by
all nations when the fulness of time shall have arrived.
This spread of purely-obtained Great Pyramid infor-

mation, unalloyed by the Cainite profanities of Pha-
raonic Egyj^t, or the interested errors and perversions
of the classic Greeks, brought by degrees several able
X PREFACE.
intellectualists into the field ; and tliey have, during

the last six years, applied so many of my own obser-
vations at the place to Mr. Taylors theory, with a

success beyond anything that he had ever hoped for,
that the matter has now completely outgrown its first
book, and produced this publication as the best answer

that I, with the assistance of the original publishers,
can make to frequent demands from various quarters
for more information. And there are even some most
interesting and hopeful circumstances in the evolution
of the scientific contents of the Great Pyramid just now,
causing the present time to be almost the beginning
of a new era of increased certainty and more precise
knowledge regarding all that that ancient building was
originally intended for ; and which certainly includes
much of the sacred, as well as the secular.
And although some well-meaning persons may have
too hastily concluded, merely because they do not find
the very name of Pyramid written down in Scripture,

that therefore there is nothing about the Great Pyra-
mid in the Bible, — yet they may rest perfectly assured
that there is a great deal about the Bible subject, in the

Great Pyramid. Which building is moreover an earlier
"^locument in the history of the human race ; while the

putting together of its stones into the vocal and deeply-
meaning shapes we see them in now, was absolutely

contemforary Avith the first of the primeval events to
which it was destined to bear indubitable witness in

these latter days, and not sooner.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
GEOGRAPHY AND THE EXTERIOR.

CHAPTEB PAGE
T. INTRODUCTORY STATEMENT TOUCHING THE GREAT PYRAMID 3
II. GEOMETRICAL PROPORTIONS 12

III. STANDARD OF LENGTH EMPLOYED IN THE GREAT PYRAMID 27
IV. FIGURE OF THE EARTH AND THE SUN-DISTANCE 40
V. GEOGRAPHICAL INDICATIONS IN THE GREAT PYRAMID bo
PART 11.
HISTORY AND THE INTERIOR.

VI. STRUCTURAL ISOLATION OF THE GREAT PYRAMID AMONGST
ALL PYRAMIDS 73
VII. THE PYRAMID COFFER . 99
VIII. WHY OF THAT SIZE? . . . . . . . .118
IX. DENSITY AND TEMPERATURE 146
X. CONFIRMATIONS BY THE NEW SCHOOL . . . . .174
PART III.
NATIONAL WEIGHTS AND MEASURES.

XI. BRITISH METROLOGY, PAST AND PRESENT 199
XII. PYRAMID CAPACITY MEASURE . 225
XIII. PYRAMID WEIGHT MEASURE . 231
XIV. LINEAR AND SUPERFICIAL MEASURE 244
XV, HEAT AND PRESSURE, ANGLE, MONEY, TIME 257
Xll CONTENTS.
PART IV.
MORE THAN SCIENCE.

CIIAPl'KR PAGE
XVI. THE SACRED CUBIT OF THE HEBREWS . 281
XVII. "time MEASURES IN THE GREAT PYRAMID" 304
XVIII. MOSES AND THE WISDOM OF THE EGYPTIANS 328

XIX. MECHANICAL DATA 348
XX. SACRED, AND PROPHETIC, TIME 874
PART y.
INEVITABLE CONCLUSIONS.
XXI. HIEROLOGISTS AND CHRONOLOGISTS 405
XXII.
XXIII.
THE SHEPHERD KINGS
SUPERIOR TESTIMONY
....
.... 418
435
XXIV. PREPARATIONS FOR UNIVERSAL METROLOGY 444
XXV. GENERAL SUMMATION : SECULAR AND SACRED 460
APPENDICES.
Appendix I. Mr. Waynman Dixon's Casing-stone . . . 489
Dr. Grant's crucial Pyramid investigations 493
„
„
11.
III. Dr. Leider's supposed Pyramid .... . .
497
,, IV. Mr. James Simpson's further Pyramid calculations. 499
„ V. Rude stone monuments versus the Great Pyramid . 505
„ VI. Recent attempts to shorten both the Great Pyra-

mid's base-side and the profane cubit of Egypt . 511
INDEX 519
ILLUSTRATIONS.
(ENGRAVED BY ALEX. RITCHIE, EDINBURGH.)
PLATE
I. General Sectional View of G-reat Pyramid [Frontispiece).
Alluded to in Chapters I. and VI. but of more or less ser-

;
viceable reference throughout the book; and of especial use in

showing the respective places of several particular parts of the
monument which appear separately in subsequent plates.
II, Casing-stone Testimony to Great Pyramid's it Construction.
Alluded to in Chapter II. The upper

figure gives an illustra-
tion of John Taylor's tt theory, requiring a particular side angle
for the Pyramid and the lower figures give the angle found by
;
Colonel Vyse.
III. Diameter and Circumference Eelations.

I Alluded to in Chapters II., IV., and X. Certain useful com-
putation numbers, both in angular and linear measure, are entered
in their appropriate places on the several Pyramidal figures, and
will be found of frequent service.
IV. Diameter and Areal Relations.

The upper figures alluded to in Chapters IV. and X., and the
lower figure in Chapter XXV., where they are shown to confirm
the numbers in Plate III. most remarkably.
V. Great Pyramid's Place in Egypt, and Egypt's in the World.
See Chapter V. This is a reduction and concentration of the

several plates in my "Equal Surface Projection."
xiv ILLUSTRATIONS.
PLATK
VI. All the Pyramids or Jeezeh.
See. Chapter VI. All these figures heing on the same scale, show
the Great Pyramid to be absolutely the largest of the Jeezeh
group and the only one with an ascending system of passages
;
and it enjoys the same superiority over all the Pyramids of

Egypt.
VII. Placing of the Passages in Great Pyramid.
See Chapter X. These two figures illustrate a simple geo-

metrical arrangement, which comes exceedingly close to the actual
lengths and angles of the passages in the Great Pyramid.
VIII. The Chamber and Passage Systems in Great Pyramid.

See Chapter VI. This is a generally useful plate to refer to,
for the more interesting parts of the interior when the frontis-
;
piece fails from the smallness of its size.
IX. The Queen's Chamber.

See Chapters X., XIX., and XX. A
chamber of important sym-
bolisms, beginning with the excentricity of the niche by the
amount, apparently, of the length of the sacred cubit.
X. The Ante-Chamber.
See Chapters IX. and X. A
small chamber fuU of sym-
bolisms, especially of the subdivision of the sacred cubit into
inches and the equal area equation of squares and circles.
;
XI. The King's Chamber.

See Chapters VI., IX., X., XIX., and XXV. The final cham-
ber of the ascending series of passages in the Great Pyramid,
the most exquisitely constructed of all the chambers, and with
the noblest symbolisms.
XII. The Grand Gallery: ascending and descending.
See Chapters VI., XVIL, and XX. The grandest interior

feature of the Great Pyramid, unknown in any other Pyramid,
and with supposed prophetic Christian symbolisms.
XIII. Mouth or the Well, in Lower Corner of Great Pyramid.
See Chapters VI., XVIL, and XX. Two views, one elevational,
and the other in perspective, of the exit from the Grand Gal-
lery to the symbolism of the bottomless pit.
ILLUSTRATIONS. xv
XIV. Star-Map for Site of Great Pyramid in Antediluvian Times.

See Chapter XVII. Exhibiting the constellations of hostile
attributes to man, occupying the mid-heaven at the night begin-
ning of the primeval autumnal year before the Flood.
XV. Star-Map for Site of Great Pyramid at Epoch of its

Foundation.
See Chapter XVII. Representing the constellations of friendly

attributes to man,
at the night beginning of the year of the Great
Pyramid's foundation ; after both the Flood and the Dispersion.
XVI. Star-Map for Site of Great Pyramid at the Present Time.

See Chapter XVII. Eepresenting the portion of time elapsed
since the foundation of the Great Pyramid, as now indicated on
the processional dial of the Pyramid and the heavens.
XVII. The Numbers measured in the Entrance Passage of the

Great Pyramid.
See Chapter XX. The numbers entered here are PjTamid
inches of distance from the north beginning of the Grand Gal-
lery ; and are supposed to represent years b.c.
THE KEY OF ENTRANCE INTO THE DESIGN OF THE
GREAT PYRAMID,
AS INVOLUNTARILY PllEPARED, YEARS AGO, RY MODERN MATHEMATICS ;
viz. :
tt;
i.e.,
When a Circle's diameter = (?=—= — = 2 -J - ',
And its circumference =. c ===. tt cl z=. — =2 ^

4 n
- tz a ;
_d c
Tlien
c 4« c"^
'^ ~ ^ ~ ^ — iâ '
= 3-14159 I
26535 |
89793 |
23846 1
+ &c., &(\, &c.
n^ log. 0-49714 I
98726 I
94133 |
85435 + &c., &c.,
|
&c.
And
^ - 0-785 39816 + &c. = log. 9-895 0899 + &c.

^ = 0-523 59878 -|- &c. = log. 9-718 9986 -f &c.
} =
4
-
TT
0-079 57747 + &c.I
= log.
o 8900 7902 4- &c.'
-,-A_ - 0-016 88687 + &c. = log. 8-227 5490 4- &c.

^ w = 1-772 45385 4- &c. = log. 0-248 5749 -f &c.
?^ TT
z: 57-295 77951 + &c. = log. 1-758 1226 -f &c.
PL.ITK 11
Fuj /
GROUND PLAN OF GREAT PYRAMID.

ITS SQUARE BASt. AND A HYPOTHETICAL CIRCLE. HAVING RADIUS EQUAL
TO VERTICAL HEIGHT OF BUILDING:
l.>.j,lli,-i »///, .Irxn/toiis of//u- dirr^l rt//// (Untjo/rul vcrdrai stcUon.s of Uu- sarin
nslored to a/iruft/ ciiniplcU-iiess
of ou///rir .
c\
CROSS SECTION OF VYSES GREAT PYRAMID CASING STONE IN SITU.

whtti
still nlln,l,.;{ l,> ihr /;itri,„ nl
. iii miJ.I/, of YorlJi .sn/r >>/
I'LATi-: in
J? '
}^
91 31 05 P. I. or 12 013 34 T. I. or-
365 -242 5'. C. nl6- 534 S. C.
DIRECT VERTICAL SECTION OF DrAGONAL VERTICAL SECTION OF

GREAT PYRAMID. GREAT PYRAMID.
EQUALITY OF BOUNDARIES.
PLATE IV.
EQUALITY OF AREAS N: 3
.v/.3/f'5 P.I.
CyireUi with Diamete-r Squxire wUJi sidi
Dtr,',-tVcrti,'al S.u'lioii ofGrPvit Vrrt' HeUpU of aiW:' ccmpitJeil hy IT.
&c X 2
EQUATION OF BOUNDARIES AND AREAS.

CIRCLES AND SQU A R E S . I N C H E S INSID^ AND SACRED CUBITS
OUTSIDE GREAT PYRAMID. .S't-c (7i r 2 .">.
See Ch^ 10 K:
PLATE V.
T.on .fitutie E<ist
.iisi rriJi
f. O r'cf 71 tfi c h .
lal. 50
XortU Noi-tl.
Vf K 1 ) T TE \l K AN- < !•: AN S E A
DESERT
rvr;nuul S^
**"
ANCIENT MEMPHllsol
Lat I.at
N'oitli
THE GREAT PYRAMID IN THE CENTRE,
AND ATTHE SAME TIME ATTHE BORDER, OF THE
SECTOR-SHAPED LAND OF LOWER EGYPT.
Lat
AV Lont/i lurit' iy-orn (i reenwi^cJi . ^ o H •
Lat
0°
North! 120 90 GO 30 5.0 60 90 120 150 18 Noi-tlil
90*
£0.
LOWER EGYPT IN THE GEOGRAPHICAL CENTRE OF I,sit
Sdiilli
THE LAND SURFACEOF THE WHOLE WORLD
inn Ihf Ell 14 111 Surt\t<-f I'rrit-iti4>n J
See Ch? 5 & 25.

J 'LA '/I': I'j
THE GREAT PYRAMID. THE SECOND PYRAMID.
GROUND PLAN OF THIS .GROUND PLAN OF THIS

PYRAMID WHEN COMPLETE, PYRAMID WHEN COMPLETE
THE TH RD PYRAMI
I D THE FOURTH PYRAMID. TH E FIFTH PYRAMI D.
tk-^ JS.
THE SIXTH PYRAMID. THE SEVENTH PYRAMID. THE EIGHTM PYRAMID. THE NINTH PYRAMID
ALLTHE PYRAMIDS OF JEEZEH IN VERTICAL AND MERIDIAN SECTION.

THEIR ANCIENT SIZE AND SHAPE BEING SHOWN BY THE DOTTED TRIANGLES OVERTHEM.
-S''v//^- fôno of \'<iJuri-.
Sef5Chn,'ic6.
PL.'ITE VII
GENERAL
PASSAGE
ANGLE
ofgrT
pyr'
AD B = Durtt, or rifjltl . I trtitaJ

Section of Great rrrntnui
from North to south .
E F OH = Square and CinJ'ortqiuil

aira- to above .
.Irujle B C S =
LENGTHS AND
PLACES OF
PASSAGES
IN GREAT
PYR°
.hid to 1'i.j. / 1 C
Y ,
/»( horizontal tiiirs,

then
Z Y paraHel to C S. ftuul,'.
entJ-ance fki.-iso</e
WT tit an. equ^l hut opfM.site

a/iff/e mo/t.s Unit d.see/idifu/
//isMtitfe aiiitthe flnind tôllerv.
hu,le B CP/;>//m P-.sv///' o/n/ual

una .v^/«/^/»v " ''^ ~ '
Latitiuie , apprvayi'
m
I'Ljy/-: vni
-^
%
platj: jx.
•02'?9sU0 9SS
.t
,fffvs-sn/j jvruox- to 11
AUBnvo QNvao 1.
J o
QNl Ny 3 HiUON
HO y 3M01
J o
LS3M 0N1M001
jux :'ixvid
05'^Z.T 9 s^D ass
;3H3NI HSIJ.IUe iO 3i«as
n 31MDXIM
gUAdua Ausnvg qnvuo 3Hi

9NiaN3as3a savav hum 3NiaN33SV SaVbV HilM
N0liD3S 3SHlASNVMi 1V01iy3A N0Ii33S 3SU3ASNVai TV3UH3A
//\ ;/.// 7/
spzf:)u/ ysijiufiJO ^^^r^rti,'
3iiNVM0 axvoioNi s3Nn oissoao asa wvho s,oniv( 3 AoevNoiionaxsNoo

JO SAAO-nOH S,3SAA aNV AbSTTVO ONVaO JO aN3 HinOS 'a39 WVH0-31NV
30 osiv'y 3g|^vH3 S9NIM J0^7s>?^.^^^/^^^''«'ryN0li0 3s nvoiiaaA
ZT Jir'i<r
.,lJUuulLll.....ulKaUu)mi.Uu».U...,
t- ni ,
• o O
X :i.i:v7ci
j'x^TJTjrir
GROUND PLAN OF THE

CIRCLES OF THE HEAVENS ABOVE THE SITE OF THE THEN
UNBUILT GREAT PYRAMID.ATTHE ANTED LUV IAN DATE OF
I
3440 B. C.
a DRACONIS ON MERIDIAN BELOW POLE, AT ENTRANCE PASSAGE ANCLE;
PLEIADES AND VERNAL EQUINOX NOWHERE VISIBLE.
See Ch. 17
GROUND PLAN OF THE
CIRCLES OF THE HEAVENS ABOVE THE GREAT PYRAMID, AT ITS EPOCH

OF FOUNDATION, AT MIDNIGHT OF AUTUMNAL EQUINOX
2 170 B.C.
CXDRACONIS ON M ER I D AN, BELO W POLE, AT
I ENTRANCE PASSAGE ANCLE;
AND PLEIADES ON MERIDIAN ABOVE POLE IN O'^R.A.;
OR COINCIDENT LY WITH VERNAL EQUINOX.

I
PLATE Jm.
FLAT£ jcra.
VERTICAL SECTION hooking Wesu OF
UPPER OR NORTH END OF E NTR A N C E - P AS S A G E
OF GREAT PYRAMID.
as it, iti noH': (nuialso by cLoUadL lintui, as itLs suppose.iL to have been.
when orujfi/uiJly ti'n/shiutfuid cJosrctup.
SCALE OF BR'TIS INCHES
lOO 200
Chap. L] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 5
and in, and tlirougliout, that mighty builded mass, which

all history and all tradition, both ancient and modern,
agree in representing as the first in point of date of the
whole Jeezeh group, the earliest stone building also posi-
tively known to have been erected in any* country, we —
find in all its finished parts not a vestige of heathenism,
nor the smallest indulgence in anything approaching to
idolatry not even the most distant allusion to Sabaism, 7
;
or to the worship of sun or moon, or any of the starry

J
host of heaven. ...—^
have specified " finished parts," because in certain
I
unfinished, internal portions of the constructivemasonry
discovered by Colonel Howard- Vyse in 1837, there are
some rude markings for a temporary purpose to be pre-
sently explained and I also except, as a matter of
;
course, any inscriptions inflicted on the Pyramid by

modern travellers, even though they have attempted to
cut their nantes in the ancient hieroglyphics of the old
Egyptians. But with these simple exceptions we can
most positively say, that both .exterior and interior are]
absolutely free from all engraved or sculptured work, asv^
well as from everything relating to idolatry or erring f
man's theotechnic devices. From all those hieratic
emblems, therefore, which from the first have utterly
overlaid every Egyptian temple proper, as well as all
their obelisks, sphinxes, statues, tombs, and whatev'er
other monuments they, the Egyptians, did build up at
any known epoch in connection with their
historical
peculiar, and, alas degrading religion.
!
Was the Great Pyramid, then, erected before the in-

vention of hieroglyphics, and previous to the birth of
the Egyptian religion ?
No ! for there, both history, tradition, and recent ex-

ploratory discoveries, testified to by many travellers and
antiquaries, are perfectly in accord ; and assure us that
the Egyptian nation was established, was powerful, and its
6 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part L
spiritually vile hieratic system largely developed, though

not arrived at its full proportions, at the time of the
erection of the Great Pyramid ; that that structure was
; ''''
even raised by the labour of the Egyptian population

but under sorne remarkable compulsion and constraint,
which prevented them from putting their unmistakeable
and accustomed decorations on the finished building, and
from identifying it in any manner, direct or indirect,
with their impure and even bestial form of worship.
According to Manetho, Herodotus, and other ancient
authorities, the Egyptians hated, and yet implicitly
obeyed, the power that made them work on the Great
Pyramid and when that power was again relaxed or
;
* This very important conclusion results from the " quarry marks " of
Ihe workmen (see Colonel Howard-Vyse's volumes, " Pyramids of Gizeh,"
London, 1840), being found in red paint on parts of the stones left
rough, and in places not intended to be seen. The marks are evidently
in the Egyptian language or manner freely handled and in so far prove
;
that they were put in by Egyptians. They are excessively rude, no

doubt, but quite sufficient as checks for workmen, whereby to recognise
a stone duly prepared at the quarry, and to see it properly placed in its
intended position in the building.
That these marks were not meant as ornaments in the building, or put
on when there, is abundantly evidenced by some of them being upside down,
and some having been partly pared away in adjusting the stone into its
position (see Colonel Howard-Vyse's plates of them) and, finallj^, by the
;
learned JDr. Birch's interpretation of a number of the marks, which seem

from thence to be mostly short dates, and directions to the workmen as to
which stones were for the south, and which for the north, wall.
/These markings have only been discovered in those dark holes or
hollows, the so-called "chauibers," but much rather "hollows of con-
struction," broken into by Colonel Howard- Vyse above the "King's
Chamber^' of the Great Pyramid. There, also, you see the square holes
in the stones, by which the heavy blocks were doubtless lifted to their
places, and everything is left periectly rough ; for these void spaces were
sealed up, or had been built up outside in solid masonry, and were never
intended to be used as chambers for human visitation or living purposes.
In all the other chambers and passages, on the contrary, intended to be
visited, the masonry was finished off with the skill and polish almost of a
jewelhir; and in them neither quarry marks nor "bat holes," nor hiero-
glyphics of any sort or kind, are to be seen :excepting always those
modern hieroglyphics which Dr. Lepsius in 1843 put up over the entrance
into the Great Pyramid, " on a space five feet in breadth by four feet in
height," in praise of the then sovereign of Prussia and which have
;
recently misled a learned Chinese envoy, by name Pin-ch'-un, into

claiming a connection between the Great Pyramid and the early monu-
ments of his own country. (See Athenteum, May 21, 1870, p. 677.)
chap.l] the great pyramid. 7
removed, thougli they still hated its name to such a

degree as to forbear from even mentioning it, yet with
involuntary bending to the sway of a superior intelli-
—
gence, they took to imitating as well as they could, ^
though without any understanding, a few of the more J
ordinary mechanical features of that great work on which
they had been so long employed and even rejoiced for
;
a time to adapt them, so far as they could be adapted,

to their own more favourite ends and occupations.
Henc6 the numerous guasi-copies, for sepulchral pur-
poses, of the Great Pyramid, which are now to be
observed along the banks of the Nile always betraying,;
though, on close examination, the most profound igno-

rance of that building's chiefest internal features, as well
as of all its niceties of proportion and exactness of
measurement and they are never found even then at
;
any very great number of miles away from the site, nor
any great number of years behind the date, of the
parent work.
The architectural idea, indeed, of the one grand
primeval monument, though copied during a few cen-
turies, yet never wholly or permanently took the fancy of
the Egyptians ; it had some suitabilities to their favourite
employment of lasting sepulture, and its accompanying
rites ; with their inveterate taste for imitation, they
so,
tried what they knew of it, for that purpose but it did ;
not admit of their troops of priests, nor the seas of

abject worshippers, with the facility of their own temples ;
and so, on the whole, they preferred them. Those more
open and columned, as well as statued and inscribed
structures, accordingly, of their own entire invention
and elaboration, are the only ones which we now find
to have held, from their first invention, an uninterrupted
reign through all the course of ancient Egyptian history ;
and to reflect themselves continuously in the placid

stream of Nile, from one end of the long-drawn land of
8 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part I.
Egypt to the other. They, therefore, are Egypt.

^
Thebes, too, with hundred adorned Pylon temple-^
its
gates, is intensely Egypt. But the Great Pyramid is f

/something perfectly different.
Under whose direction, then, and for what purpose, was
the Great Pyramid built ; and under what sort of special
compulsion was it that the Egjrptians laboured in a
cause which they appreciated not, and gave their un-
rivalled mechanical skill for an end which they did not
at the time understand and which they never even
;
came to understand, much less to like, in all subsequent

ages ?
This has been indeed a mystery of mysteries, but

may yet prove fruitful in the present advancing stage
of knowledge to inquire into further for though ;
theories without number have been tried by ancient

Greeks and mediseval Arabians, by Italians, French,
English, Germans, and Americans, their failures partly
pave for us the road by which we mast set out. Pave
it poorly, perhaps for their whole result has, up to the
;
present time, been little more than this, that the authors
of these attempts are either found to be repeating idle tales
told them by those who knew no more about the subject
than themselves or skipping all the really crucial points
;
of application for their theories which they should have

attended to or, finally, like some of the best and ablest
;
men who have given themselves to the question, fairly

admitting that they were entirely beaten.
Hence the eaxilusive notion of temples to the sun
'
and moon, or for sacred fire, or holy water, or burial-
places, and nothing but burial places, of kings, or
granaries for Joseph, or astronomical observatories, or
defences to Egypt against being invaded by the sands of
the African desert, or places of resort for mankind in
a second deluge, or of safety when the heavens should
have been for a long time past proved untenable
fall,
Chap. I.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 9
and the Great Pyramid stands out now, far more clearly
]
than it did in the time of Herodotus, as a pre-historic /
monument of an eminently grand and pure conception ^ ;
and which, though in Egypt, is yet not of Egypt, and

whose true and full explanation is still to come.
Under'^ these circumsStices it is, tliat a new idea,
based not on hieroglyphics, profane learning, classic
literature, or modern Egyptology, but on scientific
measures of the actual facts of ancient masonic construc-
tion, was recently given to the world by the late Mr.
John Taylor, of London, in a book published in 1859.*"*
He had not visited the Pyramid himself, but had been
for thirty years previously collecting and comparing all
the published accounts, and specially all the best certified
mensurations, of those who had been there and while ;
so engaged, gradually and quite spontaneously (as he

described to me by letter), the new theory opened out
before him. Though mainly a rigid induction from
tangible facts of number, weight, and measure, Mr. Tay-
lor s result was assisted perhaps by means of the mental
and spiritual point of view from whence he commenced
his researches, and which is simply this :
That whereas other writers have generally esteemed

that the mysterious persons who directed the building
of the Great Pyramid (and to whom the Egyptians, in
their traditions and for ages afterwards, gave an immoral
and even abominable character) must, therefore, have
been very bad indeed, —
so that the world at large has
always been fond of standing on, kicking and insulting
that dead lion whom they really knew not, he, Mr. John —
Taylor, seeing how religiously bad the Egyptians them-
selves were, was led to conclude, on the contrary, that
those they hated (and could never sufficiently abuse) might
perhaps have been pre-eminently good or were, at all ;
"
* " The Great Pyramid. Why was it built ? and who built it ?
(Longmans and Co.)
events, of a different religious faith from themselves.

He then, remembering, with mutatis mutandis, what
Christ himself says respecting the suspicion to be
attached when all the world speaks vjell of any one,
followed up this idea by what the Old Testament records
touching the most vital and distinguishing part of the
Israelites' religion and which is therein described,
;
some centuries after the building of the Pyramid, as

notoriously an " abomination to the Egyptians." And
combining this with certain unmistakeable historical
facts, Mr. Taylor deduced sound reasons for believing
that the directors of the building, or rather the authors^
of its design and those who controlled the actual builders 1
of the Great Pyramid, were by nomeans Egyptians, but

of the chosen race, and in the line of, though pre-
y
ceding, Abraham so early indeed as to be closer toj
;
Noah than to Abraham. Men who had been enabledlSy

divine favour to appreciate the appointed idea, as to the
necessity of a sacrifice for a sin-offering, or an atonement
by blood and the act of a Mediator an idea coeval:
—
with the contest between Abel and Cain, and v/hich
descended through the Flood to certain predestined
families of mankind but which no one of- Egyptian
;
born would ever contemplate with a moment's patience ;
for every Egyptian, from first to last, was a genuine

Cainite in thought, act, feeling, and continual open pro-
fession to the very back-bone.
On this ground it was that Mr. Taylor took his stand ;
and, after disobeying the public opinion of profane

Egyptian tradition, and setting at nought the most time-
honoured prejudices of the pagan world so far as to give
a full, fair, and impartial examination to the whole
case, announced that he had discovered in the arrange-
ments and measures of the Great Pyramid, then recently
made upon it, or as it now exists, and on these again
corrected for dilapidations and injuries of all intervening
Chap.L] the great pyramid. n
time so as to arrive at its original condition — certain
scientific results, which speak of much more than, or
rather something quite different from, human intelligence.
For, besides coming forth suddenly in primeval history
without any childhood, or known preparation, or long-
acknowledged duration and slowly growing senility after-
—
wards without any of those human features, I say, the
actual results at the Great Pyramid, in the shape of
numerical knowledge of grand cosmical phenomena of
both earth and heavens, not only rise above, and far
above, the extremely limited and almost infantine know-
ledge of science possessed by any of the Gentile nations
of 4,000, 3,000, 2,000, nay, 1,000 years ago, but
they are also, in whatever they chiefly apply to, very
essentially above any scientific knowledge of any man
up to our own time as well.
This is indeed a startling assertion, but from its sub-
ject admitting of the completest and most positive refu-
tation, if untrue. For the exact science of the present
day, compared with that of only a few hundred years
ago, is a marvel of development and capable of giving
;
out no uncertain sound, both in asserting itself, and

stating not only the fact, but the order and time of
the minutest steps of separate discoveries. Much more
then can it speak with positiveness, when comparing our
present knowledge against the little that was known to
man in those early epochs before physical science had
begun, or could have been begun, to be seriously cul-
tivated at all.
12 OCR INHERITANCE IN [Paut T.
CHAPTER 11.
GEOMETRICAL PROPORTIONS.
John Taylor s First Discovery.
TI/TR. TAYLOR'S first proposition with regard to the

^^ GreatPyramid, when slightly but immaterially
altered to suit convenience of calculation, is, that its —
height in the original condition of the monument, when
every one of its four sloping triangular sides was made
into a perfect plane by means of the polished outer,
sloping, surface of the bevelled casing-stones, and when
those sides, being continued up to their mutual inter-
sections, terminated at, and formed the summit in, a
point, —its height then was, to twice the breadth of
that
its base, as the diameter to the circumference of a circle.
Or, as the case is graphically represented in the

diagram (Plate 11. , Fig. 1), where the square E F G H
represents the square base of the Pyramid, and the
.darkly-shaded triangle A B D exhibits a vertical section
of the triangular mass of the building taken through
the middle of opposite sides ;
Then A c, the vertical height of the Pyramid, is to

B breadth of its base, when multiplied by
D, the side or
2, as the diameter to the circumference of a circle or, ;
A c 2 B D
: I 3-14159 -h &c. this last number,
: : : ;
3*14159, &c., being the quantity known amongst

modern mathematicians under the convenient, to us
now doubly convenient, designation tt.
Chap. IL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 15
Or again, as sho^vn more recently by Mr. St. Johi

Day, the area of the Pyramid's right section, viz., A D b,
is to the area of tlie base e f h g, as 1 to the same
3-14159, &c.
Or, as the same fact admits again of being differently
expressed, the vertical height of the Great Pyramid, A c,
is the radius of a theoretical circle, A i, the length of
whose curved circumference is exactly equal to the sum
of the lengths of the four straight sides of the actual
and practical square base of the building, viz. e F, F G,
G H, and H E.
Now this is neither more nor less than that cele-
brated practical problem of the mediaeval and modem
ages of Europe, the squaring of the circle :" and the
''
thing was thus done, truly and properly accomplished

at the Great Pyramid, thousands of years before those CJÂ
mediaeval days of our forefathers. For it was accom-'
plished by the architect who designed that pyramid,
when, over and above deciding that the building was to
be a square-based pyramid, — with of course all the
necessary mathematical innate relations which every
t
square-based pyramid Tnust have, —he also ordained
that its height, which otherwise might have been any-
thing, was to bear such a particular proportion to its
breadth of Base, as should bring out the nearest value of
TT as above mentioned : and which proportion not one
blit of millions, or of any number, of square-based pyra-
mids would be necessarily endued with and not one ;
out of all the thirty-seven other measured pyramids in

Egypt has been proved to be endowed with.
If, therefore, the quantity is really found built into
fact with exactness at the Great Pyramid, it must have

been the result either of some most marvellous accident,
or of some deep wisdom not less than 3,000 years in
advance of the world in its own time. And that
wisdom apparently was building in confidence, not for
OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part I.
-cs contemporaries, towhom it explained nothing and

showed very but for distant posterity knowing
little, ;
well that a fundamental mathematical truth like tt,

would be understood both in and by itself alone, and
without any written inscription, in that distant day
when mathematics should come to be cultivated amongst
mankind, even as they are now. A most true con-
clusion too, for experience has shown that neither mathe-
matics nor mechanics can progress in any country in
modern times without knowing well the numerical value
and calculational quantity of tt. In testimony whereof
I may mention that in Dr. Olinthus Gregory's " Mathe-
matics for Practical Men," third edition thereof by H.
Law, C.E,, at ^d%<^ 64 of Appendix, there is a Table 5,
of " useful factors in calculation," and consisting of that
invaluable number or proportion tt, or 3 '141 59, &c., in
no less than fifty-four different mathematical forms.
Enquiry into the Data.
Now of this scientific value of tt there is, and can be,

in the present day, no doubt anywhere ; neither of the
Great Pyramid's immense priority over all the existing
architectural and much more over
monuments raised,
all known books ever written, anywhere by any of the
sons of men nor again that the numbers which Mr.

;
Taylor gives for the vertical height and breadth of

base of the Great Pyramid do realise the tt proportion
very closely. But, as we are to take nothing for granted
that we can inquire into ourselves in this book, it
becomes our duty to ask what foundation John Taylor

may have had, for the numbers which he has employed
being really those which the Great Pyramid was
anciently constructed to represent, or does contain
within itself, when duly measured and corrected for
modern dilapidations.
Chap. II.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 15
In this research I soon found it necessary to read

rather extensively in a particular branch of literature,
the Egyptological where the respective authors are not
;
only numerous, but their accounts, as a rule, most

strangely contradictory. Colonel Howard- Vyse, in the
second volume of his important work,* published in
1840, gives either extracts from, or abstracts made with
admirable fairness of, no less than seventy-one Euroj)ean
and thirty-two Asiatic authors. Several more are now
to be added to the list, and it is extremely instructive to
read them all. Unless, indeed, a very great number be
read, no sufficient idea can be formed as to how little
faith is often to be placed in the narratives even of
educated men on a very simple matter and when ;
measures are given, though the}'' are measures which

those learned authors report to having measured them-
seN-es, why then, and even because of all their book-
lore and classical scholarship, ought we to feel most
mistrust, according to the experience acquired in this
looking up of pyramid literary modern authorities.
Such at least unvarying case,
cannot fail to be the
unless there are other means of proving that some
exceptional instance, among those often able men of
lettersand metaphysical philosophy, did also really
understand what accurate measurement means, and is
capable of.
It would be easy to string together a series of so-

called measures, made by
successive travellers, on the
same parts of the Great Pyramid, which should show its
blocks of solid stone expanding and contracting be-
tween different visits to it, like elastic india-rubber
balls ; but it will suffice for the present to indicate the
necessity of weighing the evidence in every case most
scrupulously have a large quantity of evidence, a
; to
great variety of observers, and to place in the first rank
* " The Pyramids of Gizeh." (Fraser, Regent Street, London.)
1 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part
of authors tq be studied in the original, closely in every

word they have written, but not necessarily to be always
followed therein:
Professor John Greaves in 1638,
The French or Bonaparte Expedition in 1799,
Colonel Howard- Yyse in 1837 and ;
Sir Gardner Wilkinson from 1840 to 1858.

At present the Great Pyramid is, externally' to the
sight, a huge mass, rudely though regularly and masterly
built of rough limestone blocks, in great horizontal
sheets, or courses, of masonry their outer, broken off
;
edges necessarily forming a sort of rectangular steps up

the sloping sides and; with a platform of sensible area,
in place of a point, on the top. But this spurious or
adventitious flattened top, as well as the spurious and
adventitious steps on the sides, have all of them merely
resulted from the mediaeval dilapidations and removal of

the pyramid's polished white-stone casing (with its outer
surface bevelled smoothly to the general slope, see Plate II.
Fig. 2), which had stood for more than 3,000 years, and
had in its day given to the structure almost mathematical
truth and perfection. This state of things was that de-
scribed by Greek, Eoman, and early Arabian- writers, and
it existed until the Caliphs of Egypt, about the year
1,000 A.D., profiting by the effects of a severe, and for
Egypt very unusual, earthquake recorded to have hap-
pened in 908 A.D., began methodically to strip off the
polished casing-stone, bevelled blocks built two bridges
;
to convey them more easily to the river, after chipping off

the prismoidal angles and edges and then employed them
;
in building mosques and palaces for the lining of the

;
great "Joseph" well, and for other public structures

which still adorn their favourite city El Kahireh, or the
victorious — ^the Cairo of vulgar English.*
* Very recently my friends Mr. Waynman Dixon and Dr. Grant have
visited the celebrated Mosque of Sooltan Hassan, in Cairo, to see if any
Chap.IL] the great pyramid, 17
It is evidentlythen the original, not the present, size

which we and must have, for testing Mr.
require,
Taylor s proposition and for approximating, by the
;
degree of exactitude that may be found, to whether it

was accident or intention which decided the shape of the
building and he has well pointed out, that no one had
;
got the true base- side length until the French Acade-
micians, in 1799, cleared away the hills of sand and
debris at the north-east and north-west corners, and
reached the levelled surface of the living rockitself on
which the Pyramid was originally founded. There,
discovering two rectangular hollows carefully and truly
cut into the rock, as if for " sockets " for the basal
corner-stones, they measured the distance between them

with much skill, and found it to be equal
geodesic
3
to 76 '6 2 English feet. The same distance being
measured thirty-seven years afterwards by Colonel
Howard- Yyse, guided by another equally sure direction
of the original building, as 764'0 English feet, we may
take for the 'present problem where a proportion is all
that is really required, the mean, or 76 3 '81 feet, as
close enough for a first approximation to base-breadth.
But the height of the Great Pyramid, which we also
need to have for the solution of our problem, is not at
all easy to measure directly with any sort of approach
to exactness and more difficult still, to reduce from its

;
present to its ancient height safely, after so very much

of the original top has actually been knocked away, as
to leave a platform " large enough for eleven camels to
lie down " in, or beneath, the very place where once the
four triangular sloping sides were continued up to a

of thecomponent blocks forming its walls could be identified as having
belongedto the Great Pyramid. They found them to be undoubtedly of
the same Mokattam stone, but too well squared to retain any of the
outside bevelled, and, perhaps, inscribed surface. The enquiry was,
however, put a stop to by the Mohammedan janitors, before it had
reached some of the most likely places near the top of the Mosque to meet
with an accidentally or carelessly left oblique surface of the older building.
point ; a sharp point on wliich an angel, or, as tlie

monkisli writer argued, any number of angels, might
stand, but not one man. In fact, the key-stone of the
whole theory of the Great Pyramid would have been
entirely wanting, even up to the present day, but for
Colonel Howard-Yyse's most providential finding of two
of the "casing-stones" in situ, at the foot of the Pyramid;
for they enable the problem to be attacked in a different
manner ; by angular as contrasted to linear measure.
or
And we might indeed accomplish the solution by
reference to angle only but having begun with linear
;
measure, we may as well on the present occasion employ

the angle merely in a subsidiary manner or to supply,;
when used in connection with the one linear datum we

have measured, the other linear datum, which we have
not been able to measure directly ; and both of them
against John Taylor's linear numbers also.
Beginnings of Objections by Captious Individuals to

the Data on which the Modern Scientific Theory of the
Great Pyramid rests.
After reading my first paper on the subject to the

Eoyal Society, Edinburgh, I was seriously warned that
two very shrewd and experienced members there had
objected to this part of the Pyramid research one of ;
them, an engineer, saying " that he had passed through

Egypt, been to the Pyramids, saw no symptoms of casing-
stones bevelled to any angle, and therefore did not be-
lieve in them." The other, an Indian naval officer, had
also been to the Pyramids on a visit, and " found such
heaps of rubbish about the great one, that he could not
see how any man could measure even its base side length
with any degree of correctness, much less casing-stones
which he could not see."
Chap. II.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 19
The First Objector.
Both these speeches are only too faithful examples

of the small extent of information on which many per-
sons, of commanding social rank, will even yet persist
in speaking authoritatively on both the present, and
long past, state of the Great Pyramid. The first
doubter about the casing-stones, should at least have
read the accounts of Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and many
early Arabian authors who described what they saw
before their eyes when the casing was still complete,
and eminently smooth and beautiful and then should ;
have taken up Colonel Howard-Vyse's own book, de-

scriptive, in details vocal with simple, naive truth, both
of how he succeeded in digging down to, finding and
measuring probably the two last of the bevelled blocks
still in situ, adhering closely by their original cement to
the pavement base of the building; and then how he
failed,though he covered them up again with a mound
of rubbish, to save them from the hammers of tourists
and the axes of Mohammedan Arabs, doubly and deadly
jealous of Christians obtaining anything really valuable
from the country they rule over. Besides which, the
large amount of casing-stones, bevelled externally to the
upon other pyramids, as on the two
slope, still existing
large ones of Dashoor the well-preserved ones of the
;
second Jeezeh Pyramid, conspicuous near its summit,

and on a bright day " shining resplendently afar," as
says M. Jomard and the granite ones of the third
;
pyramid, so excessively hard that modern workmen

have not cared to have much to do with them all this, —
which has long been known, and more which I have
presently to relate, should effect much in convincing
unwilling minds as to what was the original state of
the outside of the Great Pyramid. While a similar
case of spoUation to what that building experienced in
20 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part 1.
A.D.840, was perpetrated only a few years ago, on the

south stone pyramid of Dashoor by Defterdar Mohammed
Bey, in order to procure blocks of ready-cut stones of
extra whiteness wherewith to build himself a palace
near Cairo.*
The SecoTid Objector.
Then the doubter about the possibility of other men

succeeding in measuring what would have puzzled him
as he looked on idly, should have read the whole account
of the French academicians in Egypt, of which the fol-
lowing extract, from p. 63 of " Antiquites, Description,"
Yol. II. ,t is worthy of being more generally known than
it is viz., that after digging down through the rubbish,
:
not merely looking on with their hands in their pockets,

" They recognised perfectly the esplanade upon which the
pyramid had been established and discovered, happily,

;
at the north-east angle, a large hollow socket (encastre-

ment) worked in the rock, cut rectangularly and unin-
jured, where the corner-stone had been placed it is ;
an irregular square, which is 11 8 British inches broad in

* There is even a large consumption of ancient 'building-stones in the
accidents ofmodern Egyptian life let alone the oft burning of limestone
;
blocks into lime, for mortar and plaster-work. Thus I was astonished
in 1864 at the massive outside stair to his house which one of the
Sheikhs of the nearest Pyramid village had male, evidently with stone
blocks from the tombs on the Great Pyramid Hill. But in 1873 I am
informed by Mr. "Waynman Dixon that that village has been in the
interval entirely washed away by a high Nile inundation, and that its
inhabitants have since then built themselves a new village much closer
to the Great Pyramid Hill, and in so far nearer to their inexhaustible
quarry of stones, cut and squared to their hand.
f "lis reconnurent parfaitement I'esplanade surlaquelle a ete etablie la
pyramide, et decouvrirent heureusement a Tangle nord-est un large
encastrement, creus6 dans le roc, rectangulairement dresse et intact, oil
avait pose la pierre angulaire c'est un carre irregulier qui a 3 metres
;
dans un sens, 3'5'2 metres dans I'autre, et de profondeur 0-207 metres ils ;
firent les memos recherches a Tangle nord-ouest, et ils y retrouverent

aussi un encastrement semblable au premiere tous deux etaient bien de
;
niveau. C'est entre les deux points les plus exterieurs de ces enforcements
et avec beaucoup de soins et de precautions qu'ils mesurerent la base. Ils
la trouverent de 232*747 metres."
Chap.IL] the great pyramid, 21
one direction, 137 '8 Britisli inches in another, and 7'9

British inches deep " (measures since then tested by
myself, but only after several days spent in digging
and clearing the locality by a civil engineer with a party
of Arabs). "They made the same research at the
north-west angle, and there also discovered a hollow
socket {encastrement) similar to the formerthe two :
were on the same was between the two

level. It
exterior points of these hollows, and with much care
and precaution, that they measured the base-side length.
They found it 763-62 British feet."
The " encastrement," so discovered in the basal rock
at the north-east angle, is duly figured in plan amongst

the large French plates ; and, as I have since verified
at the place, has the inner corner curiously pared away,
evidently indicating the well-shaped rectangular outer
corner to be the true starting-point for measure ; be-
cause, also, it was originally the terminal point of the
Pyramid's substance at that lower angle or foot. From
the outer corner of the north-east to the outer corner of
the north-west " encastrement s " of their happy dis-
covery it therefore was, that the skilful French sur-
veyors extended their measuring-bars, and with the
result given above.
Mr. Taylor has assisted the explanation of, or pre-
sented some apology for, the errors of the better class
of earlier observers, by imagining their having been
really measuring along some of the elevated steps or
ranges of stones, at a height up the sides of the Pyra-
mid ; when, from the sand not having been cleared
away, they erroneously thought they were at the bottom
of the pile. But the apology was hardly required ; for
none of them sufficiently realised the importance of
accuracy in what they were engaged in and if, indeed,
;
any man really believed the Great Pyramid to be only

a tomb, and never to have been intended for anything
but a tomb, as too all our modern Egyptologists boastfully
teach, why should he trouble himself to measure it as

carefully ashe would a scientific standard of measure ?
For the length of the real, or ancient, base-side of
the Great Pyramid, therefore, no measure previous to
the French one (which is the first socket measure) should
or need be used, or can be depended on to within a
serious number of feet. And as the French measures
cannot now be repeated or- replaced by any decidedly
better,without previously incurring a large cost in re-
covering the sites of those important " encastrements"
ov fittings-in of the outer corners of the Pyramid's base,
and still more in clearing and levelling the much-encum-
bered ground between them, we must not let the said
French measures drop out of sight.
Colonel Howard-Yyse, indeed, did go to much of this
remarkable expense and not only procured another
;
measure of the very original pyramid base breadth of

the builders on the north side from end to end, but, as
already mentioned, found near the middle thereof two
of the ancient exterior casing-stones still forming, on
the rocky platform, both a firmly-cemented part of the
old basal line, and a beginning of the northern upward-
sloping side of the building.
Howard-Yyse' s Casing-stones.
The extreme value residing in these angular relics,

was not only because they were of the number of the
original casing-stones actually in situ and undisturbed,
and therefore showing what was once the veritable out-
side of the Great Pyramid, viz., smooth, polished, dense
white limestone softer than marble in a sloping plane ;
but because they exhibited such matchless workmanship :
as correct and true almost as modern work by optical

instrument-makers, but exhibited in this instance on
Chap. II.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 23
blocks of a height of nearly 5 a breadth of 8 feet,

feet,
and a length perhaps of 12 feet with joints, including

;
a film of interstitial cement, no thicker than "silver

paper." The angle of the inclined or bevelled outer
surface, measured very carefully by Mr. Brettell, civil
engineer, for the Colonel, came out 51° 50' and being ;
computed from linear measures of the sides, made for

him by another engineer, came out 51° 52' 15 •5''.'*
Results extremely accordant with one another, as com-
pared with the French determination (before there was
anything on which to determine accurately, other than
the present ruined and dilapidated sides of the edifice)
of 51° 19' 4"; or of previous modern observers, who
are found anywhere and most variously between 40°
and 60°.
But the Colonel's engineers, though good men and
true, were not accurate enough for the extraordinary
accuracy and merits of the unique piece of ancient work
they had to deal with and in the linear measures
;
which he gives in p. 261, Vol. I., of his great book (and

the length measures of the sides of a triangle, as every
practical surveyor knows, are capable of laying down its
particulars on paper much more accurately than can be
done by using the angles through means of an angle-
showing protractor), there is one anomaly which seems
to have escaped remark hitherto. The stone itself, in
cross section, and its accompanying numbers, stand as
in our Fig. 2 of Plate II.
The lengths, having been only attempted to be given
to the nearest inch, are lamentably short of the refine-
ment to which they might have been taken ; and an
accurate measure of such noble sides, would have given
the angle by calculation far closer than it could have
been observed to, by any clinometer then at the pyra-
mids, or indeed in all Egypt, and perhaps Europe.
Sir John Hferschel, Athenceum, April 23, 1860.
By subtracting
the upper from the lower surface length
the figure is reduced to a triangle for calculation and;
we have what should be a right-angled triangle at B

(Fig. 3), where a =59, 6i=:75, and c:i=i48 inches all
by measure. But the value of the angle A is then
found to be so very different, accordingly as it is com-
puted from h c, or a h, that we may soon perceive
*clearly that B is not a right angle and on computing what
;
it is from the three sides, it appears to be 88° 22' 52-6".
This, however, is such an egregious error for workmen

like those of the Great Pyramid to have committed, and
in their easiest angle, that I incline to think Mr. Perring
must have made a mistake of an inch in his measure of
the base breadth of the stone, his most difficult side to
measure. Indeed it would need a little more than an
inch to be taken off his number, to bring the angle B
up to 90° but as Mr. Perring does not deal in smaller
;
quantities than an inch, and as none of the sides were

likely to have fallen on an even inch exactly, I have
not ventured to make so strong a correction upon one
of them only, though too it would be to bring it up to
the round pyramid number of 100 inches in length;
and I leave the twin results of the Vyse casing-stones
as given out to the world by their discoverer.
John Taylors Proposition supported by Howard-Vyses

^ ^^^^^ Casing-stone .4-'if^gle.
~^xi the whole, then, taking everything into practical

consideration, the ancient angle of the Great Pyramid's
slope may be considered to be certainly somewhere
between the two measured quantities of 51° 50' and
51° 52' 15 "5", while there are many reasons for believ-
that it must have been 51° 51' and some seconds.
V many seconds, the modern observations are not
conii^tent altogether to decide :but if we assume for the
CHAPÎrf THE GREAT PYRAMID. ^"^S
:ime 14-3", and employ tlie whole angle, viz. 51° 51' 14*3'
Avith the length of the base side as already given from
linear measure =
763*81 British feet, to compute the
height, we have for that element 4 86 '2 567 and from ;
these values of height and base-breadth, computing the

proportion of diameter to circumference, there appears
486-2567 76381 x 2 : :: 1 3*14159, &c.* : And this
result in shows that the Great Pyramid does
so far
represent the value of tt a quantity which men in
;
general, and all human science too, did not begin to

trouble themselves about until long, long ages, languages,
and nations had passed away after the building of the
Great Pyramid and after the sealing up, too, of that
;
:and primeval and prehistoric monument of the patri-

'chal age of the earth, according to Script]xr©r"
Furm^v-Bmffijmhations of John Taylor^ s Proposition.
Hence the first stage of our trial terminates itself

with as eminent a confirmation as the case can possibly
admit of, touching the truth of John Taylor's proposi-
tion or statement and I am even in a position now to
;
add the absolute weight of personal examination, as well

as of inquiries carried on at the place for a longer time
and with better measuring instruments than any of my
predecessors had at their command. I was not indeed
so fortunate as Colonel Howard- Vyse in finding such
large, entire, unmoved, and well-preserved casing-stones
as he did but was enabled to prove that the enormous
;
rubbish mounds now formed on each of the four base

sides of the Pyramid consist mainly of innumerable
fragments of the old casing-stones, distinguishable both
by the superior quality of their component stone and
* John Taylor's numbers for the vertical height and the base-breadth
of the Great Pyramid were 486 and 764 feet evidently the nearest pos-
:
sible approximation by whole feet.

their prepared angle of slope always conformable, within

very narrow limits, to Colonel Howard -Yyse's determi-
nation. And a number of these almost " vocal " frag-
ments are now deposited in the museum of the Eoyal
Society, Edinburgh.
Also, by careful measures of the angle of the whole
Pyramid along all four of its corner or " arris " lines
from top to bottom, observed with a powerful astrono-
mical circle and telescope, as more particularly described
in my larger book, "Life and Work at the Great
Pyramid," in 1865, the same result came out. For
that corner angle so measured (see the outer triangle
A d^ 6 in Fig. 1, Plate II., and compare also Figs. 1 and 2
of Plate III.) was found to be 41° 59' 45'' nearly and
:
that gives by computation, according to the necessary

innate relations of the parts of a square-based pyramid,
for the side slope of this"Great" one, 51° 51' and some
seconds ; or without any doubt the representative of the
angle Colonel Howard- Vyse did observe on the side
and the one which, if it is there, necessarily makes the
1 Great Pyramid express the value of tt, or the squaring
of the circle, whatever the absolute linear size of the
whole building may be.
But that feature of linear size contains other pro-
blems within itself, the nature of whose origination is
even still more mysterious than this one, now prac-
tically solved, touching the angle of rise of each of the
four inclined sides and the object thereof.
CHAP.m.] THE GREAT PYRAMID.
CHAPTER III.
STANDAED OF LENGTH EMPLOYED IN THE GREAT

PYRAMID.
A Foot Standard unsuitable for tt on the Great Pyramids

Scale.
TN the process of recomputing Mr. Taylor's circum-

-^ Pyramid on p. 25, after
ferential analogy of the Great
his own manner by and horizontal
linear vertical height
base-breadth, the quantities which we employed* were
expressed in English feet ; but it does not therefore
follow that they, or indeed any foot-measures, were
employed by the ancient builders.
Certainly the length, want of meaning, and incon-
•venience of the fractions obliged to be introduced in
order to represent the true, or tt, proportion of the one
Pyramid element to the other, in these particular, abso-
lute, No doubt
linear terms, tend to forbid the idea.
that a foot something of a natural and very common
is
measure,t and may have been (I do not say that it was)

extensively used in Egypt for many agricultural and
other operations, which, are innocent and
if lowly, ''
hurt not ;"

but still there is good reason for disputing
whether a "foot" was ever lifted up against that
Viz., vertical height = 486*2566 feet, and length of one side of
base = 763-81 feet.
t The natural or naked foot of man is shorter, say about 10'6 in place
of 12 inches ;but the practical foot of civilized man, sandalled, shoed, or
booted, is often more than 12 inches long.
grandest building of all antiquity, the Great Pyramid,

by the authors thereof.
If then a foot-measure was not likely, and the pro-
fane Egyptian cubit (whose length was close to 20*7
British inches) gave similarly inconvenient fractions, what
sort of standard of linear measure was likely to have
been employed at the building, or rather by the builder
or architect of the whole design, of the Great Pyramid ?
What Standard would suit tt on the Scale of the Great

Pyramid ?
As a first step in such an inquiry, let us see whether
an equally exact proportion between linear height and
twice base-breadth, to what our long fractions of feet
gave, cannot be obtained from some simpler numbers.
Take, for instance, 116'5 366-0. : These do not give
the value of tt exact, as no simple numbers can, when
the proportion itself belongs really to the incommen-
surables but it is an astonishingly close approach, and
;
an admirable clearing away of fractional troubles in all

approximate work, for such plain and small numbers to
make and the exceedingly trifling fraction* by which
;
the one should be increased, or the other decreased, does

not, in the existing state of our pyramidal knowledge,
make much practical difference upon most of the ques-
tions which we shall have presently to take up.
Are there, however, any other reasons than such
mere convenience, why we should attach any significance,
touching importance in the design of the Great Pyramid,
to these particular numbers ?
There are such reasons.
In the first place, 366, which represents here (for
* Either 116-5014 366-0000, or

:
116-5000 365-9956, would be closer,

:
but not so convenient in multiplication and division.

Chap. III.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 29
our arbitrary diameter of a circle 116'5) the tt circum-

ferentialanalogy of that circle, is also the nearest even
number of days in a year or more precisely, of solar
;
days in a mean tropical solar year or, again, of day- ;
steps in the circle of a year, the most notable and im-

portant of to man.
all circles
We now know, by modern science, that the exact

number of these day-steps in the natural year is
365*2422 + an almost endless fraction of unascertained
length ; though practically, and for the ordinary pur-
poses of life, all civilised nations now use 365 even ;
except in leap-year, when they do, evenly also, make

their year to consist of 366 days.
In the second place it may be stated, that that por-
tion of the Pyramid employed as the chief datum of
linear measure in the problem under discussion, viz.,
the length of each side of its square base as determined
by the " socket " measurements, both of the French
savants and Colonel Howard- Vyse, when it comes to be
divided into 366 parts, seems to give each of them a
length approaching nearly to one ten-millionth of the
earth's semi-axis of rotation, or close upon 25 British
inches. Equivalent, therefore, if further and indepen-
dently proved, to the architect having laid out the size
of the Great Pyramid's base with a measuring-rod 25
inches long in his and in his head, the number
hand ;
of days and parts of a day in a year coupled with the ;
intention to represent that number of days in terms of

that rod on each base side of the building.
A Day and Year Standard indicated, with Earth

Commensurability.
Now this is a feature, in all sober truth, if that
quantity of length was really used intentionally as a
standard of measure, of the most extraordinary import-
ance ; for it is only since Newton's time that men

knew anything exact about, or have attributed anything
peculiar in its size to, the earth's axis of rotation as dif-
ferentfrom any other diameter thereof. It is, therefore,
to man, evidently a result of modern science alone and ;
every modern civilised nation has, during the present

century, been obliged to perform gigantic trigonometrical
operations and " degree measurings," in order to arrive
at any approach to accurate knowledge of the true
length of that earth-line, or rotation axis of the earth ;
and they are still pursuing the inquiry with most

extensive establishments of well-trained surveyors and
scientific calculators.
Their best results hitherto oscillate generally about
500,500,000 English inches within very narrow limits,
though some of the results are as great as 500,560,000,
and others as small as 500,378,000.
Such, then, are the ranges of uncertainty in which
England, France, Germany, America, and Russia are
placed at this moment and yet they are immensely
;
closer in accord, and nearer to the truth, than they

were only fifty years ago while 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000
;
years since, even the most scientific of men knew nothing

but what was childish about the size of that earth on
which it had pleased God to place his last and most
— —
wondrous act of creation man to dwell, and play his
part, for a little season.
Is it possible, then, that at a much earlier date still
than 3,000 years ago, or on the occasion of the founding
of the Great Pyramid in 2170 B.C., the author of the
design of that building could have known both the size
and shape of the earth exactly, and have intentionally
chosen the unique diameter of its axis of rotation as a
reference for the standard of measure in that building ?
Humanly, or by human science finding it out then,
and in that age, of course was utterly impossible. But
Chap.HT.] the great pyramid, 31
if the thing was inserted there in fact —and if its in-

sertion be not owing to accident, and if traces of the
supernatural are attributable only to God and to his
Divine inspiration, it must be one of the most remark-
able facts that occurred at the beginning of the post-
diluvial career of man, outside of Scripture history; ancf]
stands next in importance to Scripture itself for man to L
inquire into, as to how, and for what end, it was allowed I
or aided by the Almighty to take place. J

More Rigid Inquiry into the Absolute Length of the
Base-side of the Great Pyramid.
The first thing, therefore, for us to do now, is to

ascertain if the alleged fact is there what ; or, rather, to
degree of accuracy it is there for in all practical work
;
of physical science and nicety of measurement, good

scientific men know that nothing whatever can be as-
certained absolutely, but only within certain limits of
error ; those limits becoming smaller as observation
improves, but never entirely vanishing.
then, the ten-millionth part of the earth's semi-
Is,
axis of rotation, or 2 5 '02 5 British inches (according to

the estimate of the axis rotation being 500,500,000
British inches long),'^''" multiplied by 365 '242 (the number
of solar days in a year), the true length of a side of the
square base of the Great Pyramid ; and if it is not, by
how much does it differ ?
The above theoretically proposed quantity evidently

amounts to 9,140 British inches, nearly. And at the time
of the first edition of this book being published, the
only admissible, because the only socket-founded, deter-
minations of the base-side lengths that I was acquainted
with, were, 1st, the French one (see p. 21) = 7G.3-62
* The earth's equatorial diameter is about 602,226,000 British inches

long.
English feet = 9 1 6 3 "44 British inches ; and, 2nd, Colonel

Howard-Yyse's, of 764 English feet =
9,168 British
inches and
; both of them are too large.
This error, if it is so, did not affect our determination
in the last chapter for the tt shape of the Great Pyramid,
because we computed the height in terms of this same
base-breadth by reference to an angle observed quite
independently. But now we require to know more
positively whether the length then used was real or
figurative only and when I was actually at the Great
;
Pyramid in 1865, Messrs. Alton and Inglis, engineers,

succeeded in uncovering all four of the Great Pyramid's
corner sockets (as duly detailed in my book, " Life and
Work"), and then proceeded to measure from socket
to socket every one of the four sides of the base and :
with what result ? They made them all shorter, far

shorter than both the French and the Yyse determina-
tions, or equal only to 9,110 British inches on the mean
of the four sides.
Either their measures then must have been very bad
and too short, or those of the French and Colonel
Howard-Yyse were bad and too long. I inclined to
divide the errors between them in my book; '' Life and
Work," published in 1867 and in 1869, when the
;
Koyal Engineer surveyors, returning from the Sinai

survey, went (according to orders) to the Great Pyramid,
and announced, through their colonel at home, that
the mean length of a side of its square base, from
socket to socket, was 9,180 British inches, my idea of
even-handed justice seemed to be in part confirmed.'""
* The Great PjTamid's base-side length was recently quoted from
Sir H. James by the "Warden of the Standards in Nature as 9,120 Br.
inches. But this was an error; for on page 7, line 4 ab imo, Sir H. James
(then Col., now Gen.), E.E., states distinctly in his "Notes on the Great
Pyramid," that " the mean length of the sides obtained by the Ordnance
Surveyors was 9,130 inches " and it is only when he goes on to take the
;
—
mean of his men's 9,130, with Aiton and Inglis's 9,110, wholly ex-
cluding the French surveyors and Colonel Howard- Vyse, that he —
announces that "9,120 inches was therefore the true length of the side
But as there are internal features of evidence that

none of the measures, not even the last, were accurate
enough to be depended on to the third place of figures
(whether measured upon only one side, or all four sides,
of the base considered square by everybody), all men
are at this very moment left by the last pyramid
base-side measurers of modern times in this predica-
ment — viz., the theoretical length of 9,140 inches,
which would imply such almost unutterable wisdom,
or such inconceivably happy accident, for that primeval
time, on the part of the designer of the Great
Pyramid, is really found amongst, or as though it were
one of, the best results of modern measure. It
is, indeed, notably confirmed by them or may be ;
asserted upon and by means of them, within such

limits as they can confirm anything and if those ;
limits are coarse, that coarseness is entirely the fault

of the modern measurers, not of the ancient building
which, founded on a rock (and an admirably firm and
nearly unfissured hill of dense rock of nummulitic
limestone, in nearly horizontal strata), could not pos-
sibly have expanded and contracted between the suc-
cessive modern dates of 1799, 1887, 1865, and 1869
A.D., as the recent measures seem at first to imply. The
variations, therefore, first from 9,163 to 9,168, then
to 9,110 and then to 9,180, must be merely the pim
and minus errors of the modem measurers or of men :
intending honestly to do well if they could, but erring

involuntarily, sometimes to one side and sometimes to
the other of exactitude.
of the Great Pyramid when it stood perfect." The reason of this dis-
honourable shelving of the honourable older observers, with their larger
results, is shown in the next line, where the Colonel develops his absurdly
mistaken theory of the much later Greek cubit having decided the length
of the early Great Pyramid base-side, and requiring such a length as
9,120 inches ; of which more anon.
T}i& Earth-axis, and Year, Commensurable Result

further indicated.
Of course better measures than all that have been yet

taken might be made, and should be instituted forth-
with, to clear up so notable a point in the primeval
history of man but the expense to be incurred in the
;
preliminary clearing of the ground to allow of accurate

measuring apparatus being brought to bear, is beyond
the means of any ordinary poor scientific man and ;
the Great Pyramid is not a favourite subject either with

rich men or the wealthy governments of wealthy nations
while the invaluable corner sockets, never properly
covered up since 1865, are daily being trodden and
broken down at their edges out of shape and out of size ;
so that we are not likely to see sj)eedily, if ever, any

better measures of the base-side length than those
already obtained.
But as they, when considered by any computer fully,
honestly and fairly, do include the theoretical 9,140
British inches, we are already justified so far (and we
shall have in a future chapter signal confirmation from
the interior of the Pyramid), in upholding the high
degree of probability that the reason why the Great
Pyramid (made already of a particular shape to enun-
ciate the value of the mathematical term tt) had also
been made of a particular size, was, —
in part, to set forth
the essence of chronology for man in chronicling all his
works upon this earth. For evidently this was accom-
plished there, by showing that the number of times that
the Pyramid's standard of linear measure would go into
the length of a side of its square base, was equal to the
number of days, and parts of a day, in the course of
a year. That standard of linear measure being, more-
over, with a marvellously complete appropriateness, the
ten-millionth of the length of the earth's semi-axis of
Chap. IIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 35
rotation or of half of that axis, by the earth's rotating

:
upon which before the sun, that particular number of

days for work and nights for rest is constantly being
produced for all humanity in the course of the earth's
annual revolution around the sun.
Hence there is here wheel within wheel of appro-
priate and wise meaning, far above any mere single case
of simple coincidence of numbers and which implies ;
something beyond mechanical accident on the part of

the ancient architect, though our own modern Egyptolo-
gists and the ancient Egyptians and all the rest of the
pagan world too, saw nothing of it. The afGair was
open, because it was on the surface, during all antiquity,
and especially open during the days of the Greek
philosophers in Alexandria, when the Great Pyramid
was still complete in size and finish, with its bevelled
casing-stones forming the then outside finished surface
of the whole ; and any of those learned men, by merely
dividing the Pyramid's base-side length by the number
of days in a year, might have acquired to themselves
the most valuable scientific standard of length contained
in the whole physical earth ; but none of them did so.
Beginning of Reference to the Great Pyramid's Numbers.
And the affair grows in wonder the further we inquire

into For Mr. Taylor, led by the numbers of British
it.
inches which measure the earth's polar-axis length,

and other men, also led by the dominance of fives in the
Pyramid's construction (as that it has five angles and
five sides, including the lower plane of the base mathe-
matically as one) —
ventured the suggestion, that the
author of the Great Pyramid's design both had, and used,
as his smaller unit of measure, an inch. An inch, though,
larger than a British inch by a thousandth part, i e.
about half a hair's-breadth ; an apparently unimportant

quantity, and yet it is that which enables the round,

and at the same time grand, Pyramid number of jive
hundred millions of them, even, to measure the length
of the earth's polar diameter with exactitude.
With these inches, the day standard of linear measure
for the side of the base of the Great Pyramid is 5 x 5,
or just 25 of them ; and that length, while it will be
shown presently to be fully deserving of the appella-
tion, amongst all Christians, of " Sacred Cubit," we will
in the meanwhile only call the cubit of the Great
Pyramid's scientific design. Next, as there are four
sides to the Pyramid's base, the united length of all of
them evidently equals 36,524 Pyramid inches; or, at
the rate of a round hundred inches to a day, the whole
perimeter of the building (already shown to represent
the theoretical tt circle) is here found to symbolise once
again, inday lengths, the practical circle of the year,

so essential to the life and labours of man.
—
Now is it not most strange, or rather is, it not
ominously significant, that the ancient profane cubit of
idolatrous Egypt, 20*7 British inches long nearly, if
applied either to the Great Pyramid's base-side, or base-
any other
diagonals, or vertical height, or axis lines, or
known radical length of the out no
building, brings
notable physical fact, no mathematical truth. While
the other length of 25*025 British inches (which the
profane Egyptians, and the Jupiter and Juno and Yenus
wôrshipping Greeks, when in Egypt, knew nothing of)
brings out in this and other cases so many important
coincidences with nature, as makes the ancient monu-
tnent speak both intelligibly and most intellectually to
the scientific understanding of the present day.
Why, it seems almost to imply, — so far as the close-
ness of a 25 British inch length, to being the key for
opening this part of the design of the Great Pyramid, is
concerned, —
that there was more of intercommunication
in idea and knowledge between the architect of the

Great Pyramid, and the origines of the Anglo-Saxon race
(whose national unit of linear measure the inch more
especially than between the said architect or designer
is)
of the one Great Pyramid in Egypt, and all the native >
Egyptiîn people of all the ancient ages, with their in-
variable 20-7 inch cubit, which explains nothing, ex-
cept their early connection wdth Babylon and they,
;
the holders of it, than those of Babel,

idolaters worse
and Cainite religious professors every one of them.
The Great Pyramid's Linear Standard contrasted tuith

the French Metre.
We have thus arrived by a comparatively short and

easy path, at the same chief result touching the Great
Pyramid's standards and units of linear measure, and
a probability of -whence the British inch was derived
in primeval days of purity and patriarchal worship
before idolatry began, —
which Mr. Taylor equally ob-
tained, but by a more circuitous process ;and what a
result it is, in whatever point of view we look upon it,
or by whatever road we have attained to it
The nations of the world three thousand years ago, of
their own selves and by their own knowledge, cared little
about their national measures, and knew nothing but
what was childish with regard to the size of the earth ;
so that all our present exact acquaintance with it is

confined within the history of the last hundred years.
The great attempt of the French people in their first
Ilevolution to abolish alike, the Christian religion, and
the hereditary wêights and measures of all nations,
and to replace the former by a worship of philosophy,
and the latter by their " metre," " French metre,"
scheme depending in a certain manner of their own
upon the magnitude of the earth, as well as to substi-
tute the week of seven days by an artificial period of

ten days, — is only eighty years old. And how did they,
the French philosophers, endeavour to carry out the
metrological part of their scheme ? By assuming as
their unit and standard of length, the 1-1 0,000,000th
of a " quadrant of the earth's surface V
Well may we
ask with surprise if that was all that science, trusting in
itself, was able to do for them. For the grasp and
understanding of the subject, that took a curved line
drawn on the earth's surface in place of the straight
axis of rotation, was truly inferior in the extreme. Sir
John Herschel has well said, but only after John
Taylor s statement about the Pyramid had lighted up
his mind with the exquisite thought, of how near after
all the British hereditary inch is to an integral earth-
measure, and the best earth-measure that he had ever

heard of, —
Sir John Herschel, I repeat, has said, " So
long as the human mind continues to be human, and
retains a power of geometry, so long will the diameter
be thought of more primary importance than the cir-
cumference of a circle ;" and when we come to a sphere,
and in motion, the axis of its dynamical labour should
hold a vastly superior importance still.
Again, the French philosophers of eighty years ago,
in fixing on a Meridional quadrant of surface for their
metre's derivation, had no idea that within the last
f
three years the progress of geodesy would have shown
the earth's equator was not a circle, but a rather
ithat
irregular curvilinear figure,* perhaps ellipsoidal on the
whole, so that it has many different lengths of equa-
torial axes, and therefore also different lengths of qua-
I
I drants of the Meridian in different longitudes. Tliey, the

'
savants of Paris, could not indeed foresee these things
* See M. de SchuT>ert in "Transactions of Imp. Acad, of St. Peters-

burg;" and Sir G. B. Airy, Astr. R., in "Monthly Notices of Eoyal
Astron. Soc."
Chap. TIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 39
of the present day, or a state of geodesic science

beyond them ; and yet these things were taken into
all
account, or provided for, or certainly not sinned against,

by the mind that directed the building of the Great
Pyramid 4,040 years ago and the reference for the
;
grand unit, the 10^*^ or ten-millionth, part of the

earth's polar semi-axis, then adopted, is now shown to
be the only sound and scientific one which the earth
possesses.
Through those long mediaeval periods, too, of dark-
ness, confusion, and war, when our nation thought of
no such things as mathematics, geodesy, and linear
standards, the same master-mind likewise prevented our
hereditary, and quasi Pyramid, unit of measure^ the
inch, from losing more than the thousandth part of
itself; for this is the result, if it turns out as John
Taylor believed —
and as he was the first of men in these
latter days both to believe and to publish his belief
that the Great Pyramid is the one necessarily-material
centre from which those practical things, weights and
measures, in a primeval age, somewhere between the
time of Noah and Abraham, take whatever chronology
you will, were Divinely distributed to certain peoples and
tonpûes and carried with the utmost care from land
;
to land, for special purposes of some grand future manH

festation, which is yet to make its appearance on they
stage of human history.
CHAPTER IV.
FIGUKE OF THE EAETH, AND THE SUN-DISTANCE.
John Taylor s Earth and Pyramid Analogies.
TTAYING established tlius mucli, and to this degree

-LL of approximation, as to shape, size, and linear
standard of the Great Pyramid, it may now be worth
our while to bestow some special attention on two other
analogies between that building and the earth, published
by John Taylor and which, on being examined soon
;
afterwards by Sir John Herschel,'"" were honourably de-

clared by him to be, so far as he then knew, the only
good between the size of the earth and the size
relations
of Pyramid which had up to that date been
the
successfully made out though at the same time he
;
expressed his belief that they were only approximate.

A most useful caution and keeping it fully in view,
;
let us test them over again and in the terms of those

pyramidal units and standards which we ourselves have
now obtained for inasmuch as they allow us to speak
;
of the Great Pyramid in the very primal measures appa-

rently employed by its architect in planning the design,
we may thereby be enabled to put his work to a stricter
and more direct test.
The first of these two analogies by Mr. Taylor is,
* Athemeum, April, 1860 and Mr. Taylor's " Battle of the Standards,"
;
1864. See the Appendix to the Second Edition of his " Great Pyramid."
Longmans & Co.
Chap. IV.] ' THE GREAT PYRAMID. 41
when put into the form subsequently chosen by Sir

John Herschel, "a band encircling the earth, of the
breadth of the base of the Great Pyramid, contains one
hundred thousand million square feet." The built size,
in fact, of the Great Pyramid is here stated to bear
such a remarkably round and even number, as its
proportion to the created size of the natural earth, at
the epoch of its human habitation, that an argument for
intention rather than accident may spring therefrom, if
it hold closely in fact.
The feet to be used on such an occasion, can hardly

be any other than pyramid feet, or 1 2 pyramid inches
set in a line and the part of the earth for the colossal
;
band to encircle, what should that be ?

Though it is allowable enough, and very useful too
in approximate work, to speak of the earth as a globe,
or sphere, whose every great circle, or section through
its centre, will have the same length of circumference,
we cannot so do, or content ourselves therewith, either
in accurate modern science on one side, or in any
advanced stage of pyramid investigation on the other
especially when some of our earliest discoveries there,
indicated that its design discriminated between the axis
of rotation diameter, and any and every other possible
diameter through the really spheroidal, or ellipsoidal, or
chiefly flattened-at-the-poles figure, of the great mass of
the earth.
Let us come to some very clear conclusion then on
the size and sjiape of the earth, in pyramid units of
measure too, before we attempt the solution of any
further problem supposed to connect the two.
Of (lie Length of tJte Eartlis Polar Axis.
Expressed in pyramid inches (each of them O'OOl

of an inch longer than the national British inch) the
42 OUR INHERITANCE IN *
[Pam I.
polar diameter, or axis of rotation of the earth, has been

stated by modern schools
different observers of the best
of the present time to be either (see p. 30)
499,878,000
or 500,060,000 pjâmid inches in length, or any and
almost every quantity between those limits. They can-
not, in fact, be determined much closer by the best
measures of the best men and the most powerful govern-
ments of civilised nations in the present day and ;
although one office or nation publishes its results to

an arithmetical refinement of nine places of figures, it
cannot convince any other office or nation of its cor-
rectness beyond the three first places of figures. Some
of them may agree to four places, few or none of them
to five or six or more places. Therefore in this case and
all other similar ones throughout this book, I shall try to
simplify all numerical statements of measures by not

putting them down to more places of significant num-
bers than they can be nearly depended on to. Hence
the 000 with which the above statements terminate are
merely to give the proper value to the preceding figures,
and not to indicate that any one man's measures of the
earth gave forth an even number of inches in tens,
hundreds, or thousands.
" But why do they not ascertain Avhat the length of
the earth's axis is, and state it exact ? " may ask many
a reader, not directly experienced in practical scientific

measurement. Well, by all means let any and every
such reader ask, and ask again that question in the
proper quarter. Let them ask, for instance, at the
Ordnance Survey Office in Southampton, or from the
Trigonometrical Survey of India, where generations after
generations of Engineer officers have been taken away
from their proper military duties, and kept at nothing
but observations and calculations to get at the size and
shape of the earth all their lives long. They have
lived and died at that employment alone, and are still
Chap. IV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 43
succeeded at the task 'by others, and yet it is not com-
pleted. In fact, the expense of the methods and the

men employed, is increasing every day. And not in our
country alone, but in every state on the Continent, is
similar work going on, and with less chance than ever
of one exact, absolute, and universally admitted con-
clusion being ever arrived at.
Neither is this any fault of those individuals ; it is
the nature of human science, because it is human and

not divine. Human practical science can only go on by
approximations, and can never reach anything more
than approximations, though it work at one and the
same simple subject for ages. And though the subject
itself in nature and to the eye of its Creator is abso-
lutely simple, human science makes it so complicated
and difficult as it advances with its successive approxi-
mations, that the matter is crushed in the end by its own
weight, and at last falls out of the range of all ordinary
men to deal with, or even to be interested in.
Not only, too, do the experts of two different coun-
tries produce 'different measured results for the size of
one and the same earth's axis of rotation, but they
produce different results in computing the same ob-
servations until even one and the same computer will
;
produce varying quantities out of the same data by

different methods of computation, the absolute cor-
rectness of any of which he does not pretend to
guarantee, though he can say a great deal for them all,
in the present advanced state of the science.
Latest Determination of the Earth's Polar Axis.
A good example of our best know-

this condition of
ledge of the was given by a volume
earth's size
published by the Ordnance Survey in 186 G. It con-
tained some splendid computations by Colonel Clarke,

K.E., the chief mathematician of the establishment, and
gave perhaps the most highly advanced results of all
earth surveys then made by any and every nation.
Yet he presents his final results in two different shapes,
and by one of them makes the polar axis of the earth
(reduced here from British into pyramid inches) to
measure by one mode of computation 499,982,000, and
by another 500,022,000; leaving the reader to choose
which he likes, or any mean between the two.
This was, in its day, a great advance upon everything
before it but now, in place of being contented with
;
either one or other or both those results, all Eurojoean

countries are engaged on further measurements of the
earth which measurements, after the consumption of
;
more millions of money, may enable the parties con-

cerned, in the course of the next century or two, to
amend the above numbers by some very small propor-
tional part but which way, there is no saying.
;
In a work entitled '' The Metric System," by Presi-

dent Barnard, of Columbia College, New York, 1872,
that able analytical mathematician and forcible writer,
at pages 94 to 105, sets forth admirably, and in plain
words, the inconceivable practical difficulties which
small irregularities in the earth's figure throw in the
way of modern science determining the size and shape
of the whole earth. And, wonderfully extensive, as well
as dreadfully expensive, as have been the geodesic
operations of all nations, taken together, during the last
hundred he considers that all their resulting
years,
data, by him shortly as "40 Latitudes,"
expressed
must eventually be increased to not less than 4,000,
before the materials for computing the earth's size will
be worthily ready for the mathematicians to begin their
unwieldy, unenviable, and humanly almost impossible,
discussions upon.
Chap. IV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 45
Equatorial and other Diameters of the Earth.
Meanwhile we have already assumed as the polar-

axis length for computation in the pyramid comparisons,
500,000,000 pyramid inches and that being a quantity ;
which this recent Ordnance publication may, and to a

certain extent does, largely confirm, but cannot over-
throw, let us hasten on to an equally close knowledge of
what the other diameters of the earth may measure.
These parts depend partly on what amount of elliptical
compression the computers assume, as either -^^^ -g--^, ^\q,
or anything else and partly what shape they assign
;
to the section of the earth 'at the equator where a

species of transverse elliptical compression is assigned
(not absolutely, but only with a certain slightly different
degree of probability that it is so, rather than not) by
the Ordnance book ; to an extent that makes one of the

equatorial diameters 150,000 pyramid inches longer
than another.
Without then attempting to decide any one's correct-
ness, I have represented these extremes in the accom-
panying table, and placed between them the very set of
earth measures which I had computed as 'probably nearest
the truth in the first edition of " Our Inheritance in the
Great Pyramid."
Tablb of Earth's Size in Pyb,a.mid Inches.
Result with Result adopted Result with

Parts of the Earth Clarke's smallest in " Our Inherit- Clarke's hii g-est
referred to. eqiiatoriol diam. ance." rirst^ equatorial diam.
edition, 1804.
Polar Diameter 500,0(>0,000 500,000,000 600,000,000

Diameter in Lat. 60 500,396,000 500,420,000 600,435,000
n ,, 45 500,792,000 600.840,000 500,869,000
30. 501,186,000 50i;2o7,000 501,301,000
„ Equator 601,577,000 601,672,000 601,730,000
John Taylors First Analogy.

With these data at our command let us return to the
Taylor-Herschel Pyramid analogy, which asserts that " a
band of the width of the Great Pyrariiid's base-breadth
encircling the earth, contains 100,000,000,000 square
feet."
An equatorial band is the only one which could
encircle the earth in a great circle, and at the same
time in one and the same parallel of latitude we pro- ;
ceed therefore thus from the equatorial diameters

:
given above, we compute the equatorial circumferences

by multiplying them by that almost magic number to
work calculations with, the tt of the Great Pyramid, or
3*14159, &c. Reduce them to pyramid feet by dividing
by 12, and next multiply by the already determined
pyramid base-breadth in Pyramid feet, viz., 760-922 ;
the following results then come out, viz. :
They all give smaller figures than the required

100,000,000,000; for the smaller equatorial diameter
gives 99,919,000,000, and the largest equatorial dia-
meter gives 99,949,000,000.
Not absolutely true, therefore, with any allowable
equatorial diameter, to the first three places. An inter-
esting approximation therefore, but, as Sir John Herschel
truly remarked, only an approximation. Let us pass
on, therefore, to the next analogy.
John Taylors Second Analogy.

The height of the Great Pyramid, says Mr. Taylor, is
the -2-7-070-00 th part of the circumference of the earth.

But why ^-7-o!o-o (rth ? That is not any known pyramid
number, like the 5's, and lO's, and 4-s of its practical
construction, or the tendency to the marked tt numbers
3 and 7 of its shape and the only approach to a
;
Chap. IV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 47
reason which I have been able to discover is the

following : —The squaring of the " circle " in every way
is a continual problem throughout the Great Pyramid
and if the area of its base be computed in hundredths
of feet, the length of the circumference of a circle
containing an equal area will be 269,740*, not 270,000',
of the same terms.
Hence the number 270,000 is not quite accurate to
begin with and if we multiply that by the Pyramid's
;
height in inches, and divide by tt, we have what should

be a mean diameter of the whole earth in some great
circle but the result comes out only 499,590,000
; ;
which number a glance at the previous table will show

is too small for all its data ; i.e. not fully true when the
third place of numbers is reached.
Hence both of these analogies may have been useful
in approximately leading an inquirer to a first cosmical
foundation, or reason, for the Great Pyramid's sizebut ;
they cannot take the place of that other relation esta-

blished on pages 31 and 34, between the length of the
Great Pyramid's base side in 2 5 -inch cubits, or its whole
perimeter in standards of 100 Pyramid inches each, and
the number of days in a year.
For that relation is apparently true to the fifth place
of numbers at least ; and, besides that, is backed by a
cosmical relation with good reason of the utmost impor-
tance to men
and to the Pyramid too as an anthro-
;
pological monument, and in so far as its design 7}iay\

contain a message from Heaven to man, touching v
closely on his personal welfare and future social and I
governmental condition upon this earth. ^^

* Even one simple arithmetical coincidence
is not so frequently met with
as some persons imagine.
For whereas in 1869 one of the Ordnance
officersattempted to turn the pyramid cubit into ridicule as an earth
—
meisure, " Because," said he, " the British foot is as closely com-
mensurable a measure of an equatorial degree of longitude, in terms of
the year and its days too, as the pyramid cubit of the earth's polar semi-
axis and we know that that relation of the modern British foot must be
;
Grander Pyramid and Solar Analogy.
Yet however valuable these last two basal cum annual

analogies may they only hold their position at all
be,
by means of the base-breadth being measured on each
occasion in one particular linear standard, and no other.
They are neither of them, therefore, that grander relation
between the Pyramid as a whole, and something either
in the heavens above or the earth beneath, quite inde-
pendent of the terms of measure, which mankind had
been long hungering and thirsting for but which was ;
;jnly at last obtained by my friend William Petrie, C.E.,

when studying the mensurations in " Life and Work,"
in October, 1867.
He then remarked, and naturally enough, that the
circle typified by the base of the Great Pyramid has
already been proved to symbolise a year, or the earth's
annual revolution around the sun and the radius of
;
that typical circle had also been shown to be the ancient

vertical height of the Great Pyramid, the most important
and unique line which can be drawn within the whole
edifice.
Then that line, said he further, must represent also
the radius of the earth's mean orbitround the sun ;
and in the proportion of 10^ or 1 to 1,000,000,000 ;
because, amongst other reasons, 10:9 is practically the

shape of the Great Pyramid. For this building notwith-
standing, or rather by virtue of, its tt angle at the sides,
has practically and necessarily such another angle at the
corners, —
see Figs. 1 and 2, in Plate III., —
that for
—
purely accidental " yet when I came to test the assertion hy calculating
the matter out, I found that the officer had taken Colonel Clarke's maxi-
mum equatorial radius on the ellipsoidal theory, had used it as though it
had been the mean radius, and did not get the full number he required for
his assertions even then. So that his number, instead of coming out to
365,242-, only reached 365,234-, but had no right to be quoted higher
than 365,183-; and there all the scoffer's reasoning and analogy ended,
-while the Pyramid's continued to go forward to greater things.
Chap.IV.J the great pyramid. 49
every Un units its structure advances inward on the

diagonal of the base, it practically rises upwards, or points
to sunshine, by nine. Nine too, out of the ten charac-
teristic parts (viz., five angles and five sides), being the
number of those parts which the sun shines on in such
a shaped pja-amid, in such a latitude near the equator,
out of a high sky ; or, as the Peruvians sa}^, when the
sun sets on the Pyramid with all his rays.'""
TF. Petries Pyramid Sun-distant j.
To computation Mr. Petrie instantly proceeded, reduc-

ing the 5,813 pyramid inches of the Pyramid's height
to British inches, multiplying them by 10^, and reducing
those inches to miles, —when he Avorked out the quantity
91,840,000. Alas! sighed he, the analogy does not
hold even in the second place of figures, for the real
sun-distance by modern astronomy has been held during
the last half century to be 95,233,055 miles.t
So he threw his papers on one side and attended to
other matters until one fine morning he (a man then
;
almost wholly
occupied with chemical engineering)
chanced to hear, that although the above number, ninety-
five milHons odd, had been held to for so long by all the
modern world, mainly because it had been produced by
Tliis 10 9 shape of the Great Pyramid was independently discovered

:
soon afterward by Sir Henry James and Mr. O'Farrell, of tlio Ordnance
Survey Office and it is interesting to notice that the side anpfle com-
;
puted from it amounts to 51° 50' 39 ""l ; the ir angle being 51" 51' 14"'3 ;
and the angle from Mr. Taylor's interpretation of Herodotus, or to the

effect of the Great Pyramid having boon built to represent an area on tho
side, equjil to tho height squared, 51° 49' 25". The vertical heights in
Pyramid inches, are at tho same time, using the same base-side length for
them all—by tho 10 9 hypothesis, 5,811 by the 7r hypothesis, 5,813 ; and
:
;
by the Herodotus-Taylor hypothesis 5,807. =

t Air. Petrie may have used a rather greater heip:ht, viz., 6,826 inches
for the Pyramid, in which case his sun-distance would have been rather
greater than 91,840,000; but the general nature of his rosult, on the
quantity approved by all European astronomy lifteen years ago, would
hiive been seubibly just tho same.
E
50 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part L
the calculations of a late first-rate German astronomer

(calculations so vast, so difficult, and with such a pres-
tige of accuracy and power about them, that no living
man cared to dispute their results), yet the astronomical
world had been forced to awaken during the last twelve
years to a new responsibility, and not only admit that
the number might possibly be erroneous, but to institute
some observations for endeavouring to determine what
it should be.
Such observations, too, actually had just then been
made, and the daily press was full of their new results.
And what were they ?
Why one group of astronomers of several nations
declared the true mean sun distance to be about ninety-
one to ninety-one and a half millions of miles and ;
another group of the same and other nations declared it

to be from ninety-two to ninety-two and a half millions
of miles. And while they were fighting together as to
whose results were the better (an actual duel with swords
was expected at one time between M. Le Terrier and the
late lamented M. De Launay), Mr. Petrie steps in and shows
that the Great Pyramid result actually is between the
two indeed, it is almost exactly the mean between the
;
contending parties, and forms therefore a' single repre-

sentation of all the sun-distance results of all human
kind even in the present age.
Granting then that modern science is now so far
advanced that it may talk, at least on a "mean of all its
results, with some degree of confidence at last of what
may not improbably be the true sun-distance, the —
correct figures for it were given, and built up, by the
Great Pyramid's design 4,040 years ago or before any
;
nations of mankind had begun to run their independent,

self-willed, theotechnic, and idolatrous courses. And if
we desired any additional proof to the records of the
history of science in general, and of the sun-distance
problem in particular,* that such knowledge could not

liavebeen obtained in that early day, when men were
few and weak upon the earth, except it came from
Divine inspiration, —the modern astronomers are now
splendidly,though involuntarily, affording it giving in- :
deed, proof heaped on proof, in the enormous prepara-

tions which they are making, at the expense of their
respective nations, to observe the transit of Venus over
the sun's disc, merely as one step towards getting the
sun- distance number, perhaps a trifle better than before,
in the year 1874.
Modem Astronomers are involuntarily proving that

Man, unaided by Supernatural Divine Power, could
not possibly have measured the Sun-distance accu-
rately in tJie Age of the Great Pyramid ; and yet it
is there
These preparations for observing the next Yenus-Sun

transit by modern astronomers have already been
going on for several years, and nothing of their kind
so costly, so scientific, so extensive, were ever seen on
the face of the earth before. From Europe to America,
and from the most northern nation's old Hyper-
borean strongholds to the most distant and newest
colonies in the Southern Hemisphere, the busy hum
resounds. Steam navigation, iron ships, electric tele
graphs, exquisite telescopes, both reflecting and re
fracting, photographic machines of enormous power,
refined " regulator " clocks, and still more refined chrono-
graphs, transit instruments, equatorials, spectroscopes,
* In the age of the Greeks, the distance attrihuted to the sun from tho
earth began with the infantine quantity of about ten miles it increased
;
slowly to 10,000 still more slowly to 2,500,000 then, after a long delay,
; ;
increased to 36,000,000, under German Kepler ; to 78,000,000 in tho days

of Louis XIV., under French La Caille; and only at length reached the
full quantity, and then clumsily overpassed it, at tho boijinning of the
preaeiit century.
52 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Paut L
altitude-azimutli circles, all these modern inventions and

many others, with all the learning of the universities,
are pressed into the cause ;
preparatory computations
too, with much printing, engraving, and publication,
have been going on for years ; and all will be car-
ried out almost regardless of expense, of time, of
danger, of obstacles, to the most distant parts of the
earth ; and where necessary, to parts, some of them in
the tropics, and some in frozen oceans, which neither
Greeks nor Eomans in all their days, nor even our own
fathers only sevent}^ years ago, knew anything of.
But all this accumulation of power, of wealth, of

numbers, of risk, co-operated in too by every civilised
nation, is stated to be absolutely necessary ; nothing of
it can be spared, nothing omitted, if we are to enrich
ourselves, in the present age, with a better result for
the sun-distance tban mankind has yet obtained ex- ;
cepting always that one result of old laid up in the

Great So the expeditions will set forth
Pyramid.
amid the warmest plaudits of the
gloriously next year,
whole modern world, and especially of its scientific
associations. Many of the pilgrims may fall like heroes
by the way, and some of them leave their bones to
whiten distant lands. Large populations at home may in
the meanwhile starve for want of the necessaries of life,
and the crimes arising out of ignorance uneducated,
crowding in squalid residences, and the innate wickedness
of human nature when left to its own devices uncorrected,
will on wholesale, making our morning papers
go
hideous. But for all that, the chosen parties will sail
with their treasuries of instrumental detail and, if the ;
usual consequences of successful scientific researches

follow, the science of the modern world will have oc-
casion to boast, after it is all over, of having improved
its number for expressing the sun-distance, —a little ;
and its acquaintance with certain disturbing pheno-

mena increasing the difficulty of the observations, and

throwing new doubts upon the final result — a great
deal.
The Great Pyramid before Science.-
What a solemn witness to all these unequal efforts

of mankind, is not the Great Pyramid, which has seen
all human actions from the beginning from the time
;
when men broke away in opposition to both the Divine

rule and inspired teachings of patriarchal life, and wil-
fully went after their own inventions.
Placed in the midst among all men, and especially
those of the earliest inhabited regions of the post-
been standing the Great Pyramid
diluvial earth, thus has
from dispersion times and they, the men so honoured,
;
never knowing anything of its knowledge capacity, or

suspecting its profound meaning. Yet these things, or
the types and measures of them, so far as we have seen
them here, were on its surface all the time. Any one,
therefore, through all history, who should have known,
if he could have known indeed, the true sun-distance,
had only to compare the Great Pyramid's height

therewith, reasoning at the same time on its shape, in
order to be enabled to perceive that the measure of
that all-important physical, astronomical, metrological,
and anthropological, quantity wâs hung up there from
ancient days, and in figures more exact than any that
modern observations have done more than merely approxi-
mate to.
But again we shall have to tell, and from facts ascer-
tained and ascertainable in just as eminently practical
a manner, that all that wonderful scientific information
(more than wonderful for the age and circumstances

under which it was placed there) was not introduced into
the Great Pyramid solely, or even at all, for strengthening
54 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt I.
men in science ; much less was it to promote tLe

worldly fame of tlie introducer. ^-v.^^ .
Science but mainly to prove to these latter

is there,
scientific days of the earth that the building so designed

has a right, a title, an authority, to speak to men of these
times, and even to the most scientific of them, on
another and far higher subject and with proofs of
;
things unseen, quick and powerful, piercing even to the

dividing asunder of the soul and spirit, and discerning
the thoughts and intents of the heart as may pro-
;
bably develop itself with unexpected clearness, if the

inquiry into what the Great Pyramid does monumentally
and mechanically testify to, is allowed to progress to
the end.
CiiAr. v.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 55
CHAPTER Y.
GEOGRAPHICAL INDICATIONS IN THE GREAT PYRAMID.
TT may, however, after our last chapter, be demanded

-- by very earnest inquirers, to be shown some easy
and material proofs of astronomy of more ordinary kind,
let alone the possibilities of so transcendental a kind,
having been intended by the primeval designer of the
Great Pyramid,^before they can fully admit the entirely
non-accidental character of the remarkable numerical
coincidences which have just been given.
The request is most reasonable, and I address myself
to the answer immediately.
"^s-ryf- llm Great FyrmmL

To begin, the reader may be reminded, that the
square base of the Great Pyramid is very truly oriented,
'
or placed with its sides facing astronomically due north,
\outh, east, and west ; and this fact at once
cmaiTr^Sîes't5Tli^"-"eiêctth^ all thephenomena of
component parts of that ryTlim^^^^^~^P^^^ ^^ P^^^
geometry alone for to pure geometry all azimuths are
;
alike, and one most particular astronomical azimuth or

direction has been picked out there.
In the early ages of the world the very correct
orientation* of a large pile must have been not a little
difficult to the rude astronomy of the period. Yet with
sucli precision had tlie operations been prime vally per-

formed on the Great Pyramid, that the French Academi-
cians in A.D. 1799 were not a little astonished at the
closeness. Their citizen Nouet, " in the month Nivose
of their year 7," made refined observations to test the
error, and found it to be only 19' 58" ; but with the
qualification added by M. Jomard, that as M. Nouet
only had the ruined exterior of the Pyramid before him
to test, the real error of the original surface might have
been less. In this conclusion M. Jomard was doubtless
right for in the similar sort of measure of the angle of
;
slope of the side with the base of the Pyramid, it was

proved afterwards, on the discovery of the casing-stones,
that his compatriot had erred to a very much larger
extent than the original builders.
As it was, however, all the Academician alithors of the
great Napoleonic compilation were delighted with the
physical and historical proof which the Pyramid seemed
to give them, when compared with their own modern
French observations of stars, " That the azimuthal
direction of the earth's axis had not sensibly altered,
relatively to the sides of the Great Pyramid's base,
during probably 4,000 years."
Possibility of Azimuthal Change in the Crust of the

Earth.
Now some action of this kind, one way or the other,

has long been a mooted question among astronomers,
though chiefly for its bearing on geography, general
physics, and geology. In its nature, therefore, it must
be kept entirely distinct from the more perfectly astro-
nomical phenomenon, and which few but astronomers
care at all about — viz., the direction of the earth's axis
in space, moving with it lihe whole substajice of the
earth at the same time ; and wherein the precession of

CiiAP.V.J THE GRJE:AT PYRAMID. 57
the equinoxes comes to the surface, with its slow but
ceaseless chronological changes from age to age in the

apparent places of the stars usually supposed most fixed.
But in the rather geographical, and more especially sur-
face-differential, light in Avhich the problem was dis-
cussed by the French 'savants of the Eevolution, it had
also been clearly seen long before, as a cynosure of study,
by the penetrating genius of the English Dr. Hooke.
For it was this early, and ill-paid, but invaluable Secre-
tary of the Royal Society of London, who, in his discourse
on earthquakes, about the year 1677 A.D., remarks,
"Whether the axis of the earth's rotation hath and doth
continually, by a slow progression, vary its position with
respect to the parts of the earth ; and if so, how much
and which way, which must vary both the meridian
lines of places and also their particular latitudes ?
that it had been very desirable, if from some monu-
ments or records in antiquity, somewhat could have
been discovered of certainty and exactness ; that by
comparing that or them with accurate observations now
made, or to be made, somewhat of certainty of infor-
mation could have been procured." And he proceeds
thus :
" But I fear we shall find them all insufficient in
accurateness to be any ways relied upon. However, if

there can be found anything certain and accurately
done, either as to the fixing of a meridian line on
some stone building or structure now in being, or to
the positive or certain latitude of any known place,
though possibly these observations or constructions
were made without any regard or notion of such an
hypothesis ;
yet some of them, compared with the
present state of things, might give much light to this
inquiry. Upon account I perused Mr. Greaves'
this
description of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, that being
fabled to have been built for an astronomical observa-
tory, as Mr. Greaves also takes notice. I perused his
book, I say, lioping I sliould have found, among many

other curious observations lie there gives us concerning
them, some observations perfectly made, to find whether
it stands east, west, north, and south, or whether it
va,ries from that respect of its sides to any other part
or quarter of the world as likewise how much, and

;
which way they now stand. But to my wonder, he

being an astronomical professor, I do not find that he
had any regard at all to the same, but seems to be
AvhoUy taken up wath one inquiry, which was about
the measure or bigness of the whole and its parts and ;
the other matters mentioned are only by-the-bye and

accidental, which shows how useful theories may be
for the future to such as shall make observations."
Dr. Hooke, however — in mitigation of whose acerbity
there is much to be said in excuse, for nature made
him, so his biographer asserts, " short of stature, thin,
and crooked " — phenomenon. Dr. Hooke, who

this real ''
seldom retired to bed till two or three o'clock in the

morning, and frequently pursued his studies during the
whole night," would not have been so hard upon his
predecessor in difficult times if he had known, and as
we may be able by-and-by to set forth, -what extra-
ordinarily useful work
was that Professor Greaves
it
zealously engaged in when at the Great Pyramid. The

Doctor's diatribes should rather have been at Greaves'
successors to-be, those who were to visit the Great
Pyramid in easy times, and then and there do nothing,
or mere mischief worse than nothing. Whence it re-
mains still, to any good and enterprising traveller, to
determine with full modern accuracy the astronomical
azimuth of the Great Pyramid, both upon its fiducial
socket marks, as defining the ends and directions of the
sides of the base and, still more importantly, on its
;
internal passages.
These passages are worthy of all attention ; and a
Chap, v.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 5g
furtlier proof of the importance attached by the

primeval builders to the strict " orientation " of the
whole building, in each of its parts as well as its mass,
is eminently shown by the apparently perfectly parallel
position which they preserved for the azimuth of the

first, or entering passage, with the base sideson either
hand and this, too, notwithstanding that (as Sir Gardner
;
Wilkinson explains) there were structural or rather deeply

politic reasons for their not placing that said entering
aperture exactly in the middle of the northern side in
which it is found, but a considerable number of feet
nearer towards the east than the west end thereof.
Pojpular Ideas of Astronomical Orientation.
In page 26 of George R. Gliddon's '"OtiaCEgjrptiaca,"

its acute author does indeed oppose any reference to
astronomical skill, by suggesting that all this exactness
of orientation indicates, amongst the builders of the " pre-
antiquity " day of the Great Pyramid, " an acquaintance
with the laws of the magnet." Yet had that been all
the founders were possessed of to guide them, their

great and lasting work might have been in error by
as much as twenty degrees, in place of only twenty
minutes, or, perhaps, far less.
George R
Gliddon is truly, on most Egyptological
topics, a well-read man, and had nearly a lifetime
of Egyptian experience to dilate on, as he does, too,
with eloquence but, unfortunately, he shares tlie
;
pseudo-scientific belief of a large part of the world in

general —
to wit, that more wisdom and science are
manifested if you do a thing badly and imperfectly by
the indications of electricity or magnetism, than well
and accurately by plainly visible phenomena of me-
chanics and astronomy. Had he been able in this
6o OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt I.
case to show that Egypt was perpetually and for ever

in a plague of darkness and enclosure of mist, men
would have been thankful for a magnetic needle, maugre
all its excessive variations and trembling uncertainties.
But when they had in that magnificent climate and

almost tropical position, the high climbing sun by day
and the exact stars by night, what else did they want to
get their astronomical alignment, and the direction of
the north, by means of?
At all events, in my own observations there in 1865,
I was happy throw magnetism and its rude point-
to
ings overboard, and employ exclusively an astrono-
mical instrument of very solid construc-
alt-azimuth
tion, and reading to seconds in that way comparing
:
the socket-defined sides of the base, and also the

signal- defined axis of the entrance passage, with the
azimuth of the pole-star at the time of its greatest
elongation west and afterwards reducing that by the
;
proper methods of calculation to the vertical of the

pole itself
And with what result ? Though a tender-hearted
antiquary has asked, " Was it not cruel to test any
primeval work of 4,000 years ago by such exalted in-
struments of precision as those of the Victorian age in
"
which we live ?
Well, might be attended with undesired results,

it
if some most praised up works of the present

of the
day should ever come to be tested by the improved
instruments of precision of 4,000 years hence; but the
only effect which the trial of my Playfair astronomical
instrument from the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, had
at the Great Pyramid, was, to reduce the alleged error
of its orientation from 19' 58' to 4' 30".'"'
* Tlie particulars of both observations and computations may be seen
in vol. ii. of my " Life and Work at the Great Pyramid, 1867."
chap.y.] the great pyramid, 6
Further Test hy Latitude,
In so far, then, tliis last and latest result of direct

observation high probability that any
declares with
large relative change between the earth's axis and a
line on its crust, such as Dr. Hooke and the French
Academicians speculated on, must, if anything of it
exist at all, be confined within very narrow limits
indeed.
its assigned reason here and thus
This conclusion has
far, from observations of angular direction on the
solely
surface of the earth and without any very distinct proof
;
being touched on yet, that though we find the Pyramid's

sides at present nearly accordant in angle with the
cardinal points, they were intended to be so placed by
the primeval builder for his own day.
But indication will be afforded presently respecting
another test of nearly the same thing, by distance on
the surface or that the architect did propose to place
;
the Great Pyramid in the astronomical latitude of 30°

north, whether practical or theoretical ; while my own
observations in 18G5 have proved that it stands in the
parallel of 29° 58' 51".
A sensible defalcation from 30°, it is true, but not
all of it necessarily error ; for if the original designer had
wished that men should see with their bodily, rather
than their mental, eyes, the pole of the sky, from the
foot of the Great Pyramid, at an altitude before them of
30°, he would have had to take account of the refrac-
tion of the atmosphere and that would have necessi-
;
tated the building standing not in 30°, but in 2 9° 5 8' 22".

Whence we are entitled to say, that the latitude of the
Great Pyramid is actually by observation between the
two very near limits assignable, but not to be discrimi-
nated between, by theory as it is at present.
Testimony, from the Great Pyramid's Geographical

Position, against some recent Earth Theorisers.
In angular distance, then, from the equator, as well

as in orientation of aspect, the land of Egypt, by the
witness of the Great Pyramid, has not changed sensibly
for all ordinary, practical men, in respect to the axis of
the earth, for 4,000 years.
What therefore can mean some of our observers at
home, observers too of the present day, who stand up for
having themselves, during their own lifetimes, witnessed
the sun once rise and set in an exceedingly different direc-
tion by the naked eye from what it does now ? I have
looked over the papers of two such enthusiasts recently
(one in England and the other in Scotland), but with-
out being able to convince them of their self-decep-
tion.
Again, in the Kev. Bourchier Wrey Savile's work,
"The Truth the Bible," pubHshed in 1871, that
of
usually very learned and painstaking author (and much
to be commended in some, subjects) implies, on page 76,
that the direction of the sun at the summer solstice is
now, at Stonehenge, no less than twelve degrees different
from what it was at the time of the erection of that
monument, which is probably not more than half
as old as the Great Pyramid. And he quotes freely
from, as well as on his own part confirms, a mad-like
man now dead, one Mr. Evan Hopkins, in asserting
**
that the superficial film of our globe is moving from
south to north in a spiral path, at the rate of seven
furlongs in longitude and three furlongs in
west,
latitude north, every whence the presently
year ;
southern part of England must have been under a

tropical climate only 5,500 years ago."
This astounding assertion is supposed to be supported
Chap, v.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 63
by a quotation from one of the Greenwich Observatory

Eeports in 1861, wherein Sir George B. Airy remarks
that " the transit circle and collimators still present those
appearances of agreement between themselves, and of
change with respect to the stars, which seem explicable
only on one of two suppositions — that the ground itself
shifts with respect to the general earth, or that the
axis of rotation changes its position." But I can ven-
ture to be professionally confident that vSir G. B. Airy
did not mean to support any such assertion as Mr. Evan
Hopkins' and Mr. B. W. Savile's, by that mere curiosity
of transcendental refinement in one year's instrumental
observation, which he wâs alluding to in one number
of a serial document a something of possible change,
;
too, w^hich is so excessively small (an angle subtending

perhaps the apparent thickness of a spider's line at the
distance of fifty feet), that no one can be perfectly
certain that it ever exists ; found at any
and which, if
given epoch, does not go on accumulating continually

with the progress of time, so as at last to become patent
to the common senses of all men.
To confirm, too, this much more sober view of the
nearly solid earth we live upon, the Great Pyramid adds
all its own most weighty testimony to that both of
Greenwich and every public observatory with good

astronomical instruments throughout Europe, by declar-
ing the world's surface to be remarkably constant to the
cardinal directions if not indeed for ever, yet at least
;
for a far longer time than they, the modern observa-

tories, can directly speak to. And thus it may come to
pass at last, that there will yet be proved to be more of
''the truth of the Bible" bound up with both the
scientific mechanical definition, and the exactly ob-
served constancy through long ages when so defined, of
astronomical directions and geographical positions, than
has yet entered into most persons' modern philosophy.
64 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part l.
True Prhneval Astronomical Orientation, as in the

Great Pyramid, opposed by all early idolatrous
structures elsewhere.
And thus, in fact, the Great Pyramid, otherwise

proved a non-idolatrous, as well as primeval, monument,
set the true scientific rule in building, of orienting its
sides to the cardinal directions. This plan was fol-
lowed also wherever that Pyramid's example, by over-
shadowing grandeur, was felt to be compulsory, as it
evidently was in the adjacent parts of Lower Egypt,
but nowhere else.
At Thebes, for instance, far away in Upper Egypt,
and in Nubia further still, the temples and tombs are
put down or founded at every possible azimuth, in
almost every quarter of the compass and those temples
;
and tombs are all of them undoubtedly idolatrous, and

speak lamentably to human theotechnic inventions.
In Mesopotamia, again, the Chaldean temples, dedi-
cated glaringly both to false gods, and all the Sabsean hosts
of heaven, are not laid out at random like the Theban
temples, but in another sort of opposition to the Great
Pyramid example ; for while their bases, though
rectangular are not square, they are set forth with their
sides as far as possible from any cardinal point, or at
an angle of 45° therefrom and steadily and per-
;
sistently thereat from one end of the Interammian

country to the other.
The Rev. Canon Rawlinson of Oxford has, indeed,
endeavoured to maintain that it was a matter of indif-
ference for the astronomical observations of those
Chaldean buildings, whether they wêre oriented upon,
or at 45° away from, the cardinal points —
but he can
be no astronomer, even as Mr. Fergusson has proved
him to have no sound practical views of architecture,
though he may be the most profound of all academical
scholars. And when we

study the Great Pyramid itself
still important results follow to its prestige
further,
and geographical power upon earth from new develop-
.
ments arising out of its north and south, with east and
west, bearings, as well as from its regular figure.
Geograjphical Aptitudes of the Great Pyraraid,
With the Napoleon Bonaparte

general's glance of a
himself, his Academician savants in Egypt, in 1799,
perceived how grand, truthful, and effective a trigono-
metrical surveying signal the pointed shape of the
Great Pyramid gratuitously presented them with and ;
they not only used it for that purpose, as it loomed far

and wide over the country, but as a grander order of
signal also, to mark the zero meridian of longitude for
all Egypt.
^
In coming to this conclusion, they could hardly but

have perceived something of the peculiar position of the
Great Pyramid at the southern apex of the Delta-land
of Egypt and recognised that the vertical plane of the
;
Pyramid's passages produced northward, passed through

the northernmost point of Egypt's Mediterranean coast,
besides forming the country's central, and most com-
manding meridian line ; while the N.E. and N.W. dia-
gonals of the building similarly produced, enclosed the
Delta's either side in a symmetrical and well-balanced
manner. But the first very particular publication on
this branch of the subject was by Mr. Henry Mitchell,
Chief Hydrographer to the United States Coast S irvey.
That gentleman, having been sent in 1868 to report
on the progress of the Suez Canal, was much struck
with the regularity of curvature along the whole of
Egypt's northern coast. To his mind, and by the light
of his science, it was a splendid example on that very-
account, of a growing and advancing coast-line, devc-
F
loping in successive curves all struck one after tlie other
from a certain central point of physical origination.

And where was that physical centre of origin and
formation ?
With the curvature of the northern coast on a good

map before him (see Fig. 1, Plate Y,), Mr. Mitchell sought,
with variations of direction and radius, until he had
got all the prominent coast points to be evenly swept
by his arc and then, looking to see where his centre
;
was, found it upon the Great Pyramid immediately :
deciding in his mind, " that that monument stands in a

more important physical situation than any other build-
ing yet erected by man."
On coming to refinements, Mr. Mitchell did indeed
allow that his radii were not able to distinguish between
the Great Pyramid and any of its near companions on
the same hill-top. But the Great Pyramid had already

settled that differential matter for itself; for while it
is absolutely the northernmost of all the pyramids (in

spite of one apparent exception to be explained further
on), it is the only one which comes at all close and it —
comes very close —
to the northern cliff of the Jeezeh
hill, and thence looks out with commanding gaze over
the sector, or open-fan, shaped land of Lower Egypt

looking over it, too, from the land's very *' centre of
physical origin ;" or as from over the handle of the
fan, outward to the far off sea-coast. All the other
pyramids are away on the table-land to the south of
the Great one, so that they lose that grand view from
the front or northern edge and they appear there,
;
behind, as in a manner the suite and following train

only of the Great building that mysterious Great one
;
who is the unquestioned owner there, and will not allow

his servants to dispute his possession with him.
So very close was the Great Pyramid placed to the
northern brink of its hill, that the edges of the cliff
might have broken off, under the terrible pressure, had

not the builders banked up there most firmly the im-
mense mounds of rubbish which came from their work ;
and which Strabo looked so particularly for 1800 years

ago, but. could not find. Here they were, however, and
still are, utilised in enabling the Great Pyramid to stand
on the very utmost verge of its commanding hill,

within the limits of the two required latitudes, 30° and
29° 58' 23", as well as over the centre of the land's
physical and radial formation and at the same time
;
on the sure and proverbially wise foundation of rock.

Now Lower Egypt being, as already described, of a
sector shape, the building which stands at its centre
must be, as Mr.Henry Mitchell has acutely remarked,
at one and the same time both at the border thereof,
and in its nominal middle or, just as was that monu-
;
ment, pure and undefiled in its religion though in an

idolatrous land, alluded to by Isaiah the monument
;
which was both " an altar to the Lord in the midst of

the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof;"
but destined withal to become a witness in the latter
days and before the consummation of all things, to the
same Lord and to what He hath purposed upon mankind.
Whether the Great Pyramid will eventually succeed
in proving itself to be really the one and only monu-
ment alluded to under those glorious terms or not, it
has undoubtedly most unique claims for representing
much that is in them, both in plain mechanical fact
and broad chorography while its excelling character-
;
istics of situation by no means end there. For, pro-

ceeding along the globe due north and due south of
the Great Pyramid, it has been found by a good
physical geographer as well as engineer, William
Petrie, that there is more earth and less sea in that
meridian than in any other meridian all the world
round ; causing, therefore, the Great Pyramid's meridian
to be just as essentially marked by nature across the

world, as a prime meridian for all nations measuring
their longitude from, as it is more minutely marked by
art and man's work for, the land of Egypt alone.
Again, taking the distribution of land and sea in
parallels of latitude, there ismore land surface in the
Great Pyramid's parallel of 30°, than in any other.
And on carefully summing up all the dry land
finally,
habitable by man all the wide world over, the centre of

the whole falls within the Great Pyramid's territory of
'''"
Lower Egypt.
Of the Mental Accompaniments of these Several Facts.
It is useless for objectors to go on complaining that

the profane Egyptians, the mere slaves of Pharaoh, did
not know anything about the existence of America,
Australia, New Zealand, or Japan, and therefore could
not have made the above calculation rightly, for I have
never accused those profane Egyptians of having had
anything to do with the design of the Great Pyramid
and have no intention of limiting my statements of
what science may find in the measured facts of the
building, merely to what Egyptological scholars tell us,
from their questionable studies, that the vile animal-
worshippers of old Egypt either did, or did not, know.
The fact is there in the Great Pyramid, and in the
Avorld, for every one who likes to test on absolute
grounds to try it for our own times first, and then to
;
reduce to the days of the Pyramid, if there are or

it
were sensible changes in the distribution of sea and land

on the whole, going on.
But that would seem not to have been the case :
and, indeed, for the special period of the truly human,

* See my " Equal Surface Projection," published in 1870 by Edmonston
and Douglas, Edinburgh. See also Fig. 2 of Plate V., in this book.
Chap, v.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 69
or division into nation, time of the world (or since both

the Deluge and the Dispersion), there is every reason to
believe that the dry land surface spot which was central
4,000 years ago is central still, and will continue to be
end of man's trial on earth. And if we be
so until the
further enabled before long to illustrate that the directors
of the building of the Great Pyramid were not natives
of Egypt, but came Egypt out of a country having
into
a different latitude and longitude, and went back again
to that country of theirs immediately after they had
built the Great Pyramid and that there, in their own
;
country, though no mean architects, yet they built no

second pyramid, —
will not that go far to indicate that,
assistedby a higher power, they had been taught and had
confessed of early time, that there was only one proper
and fully appropriate spot all the wide world over
whereon to found that most deeply significant structure
they had received orders to erect on a certain plan,
viz., the Great Pyramid ?
But if the exterior of that unique building, in these

days almost ruinous under the successive attacks of
twenty nations, leads so abundantly, when carefully
studied and scientifically measured, in spite of all those
dilapidations, to ennobling views (the like of which too
were never made out in all past time for any other
building of the earth, not even for a single one of
the other Pyramids of Egypt, which, all of them, err
utterly in angle, size, and position), what may we not

expect from the Great Pyramid's better-preserved
interior ?
PAET II.
HISTORY AND THE INTERIOR.

"who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who
HATH stretched THE LINE UPON IT ?
" WHEREUPON ARE THE FOUNDATIONS THEREOF FASTENED ? OR WHO LAID
THE COKNER STONE THEREOF;
" WHEN THE MORNING STARS SANG TOGETHER, AND ALL THE SONS OF GOD
—
SHOUTED FOR JOY ? " JOB XXXVIII. 5, 6, 7.
CHAPTER VI.
STRUCTUKAL ISOLATION OF THE GREAT PYRAMID

AMONGST ALL PYRAMIDS.
THERE is little enough of hollow interior to any of

the Pyramids, as they are generalty all but solid
masses of masonry ; and yet what little there is, has
'
shown itself quite enough to raise up a radical distinc-
tion of kind, as well as degree, between the Great
Pyramid and every other.
What the Ancients knew of the Interior of the Great

Pyramid.
The progress of human historical knowledge with re-

gard to what constituted the hollow interior of the Great
Pyramid, was both slow and peculiar. Had we now
before us in one meridional section of the building all
the ancient knowledge with regard to what it contained,

itwould amount to little more than this — that when
the Great Pyramid stood on that hill-top in the
primeval age of the world in solid masonry, with the
secret of its nature upon it, clothed, too, complete on
every side with its polished bevelled sheet of casing-
stones, risingfrom a duly levelled area of rock-surfaco
in fourgrand triangular flanks up to a single pointed
summit, —
that then it also contained (trending down
74 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
from the nortli and entering at a point about 49 feet

above the ground on that side) an inclined descend-
ing passage of very small bore, leading to a subter-
ranean, excavated, rock chamber 100 feet vertically
under the centre of the base of the whole built monu-
ment.
This subterranean chamber had been begun to be
carved out in the heart of the rock with admirable
skill. For the workmen, having cut their way down to
the necessary depth by the passage, commenced with the
ceiling,which they made exquisitely flat and smooth,
though 46 feet long by 28 broad; then sinking down
the walls therefrom in vertical planes, there was every
promise of their having presently, at that notable depth
inside the limestone mountain, a complete rectangular
chamber, whose walls, and floor should all be
ceiling,
perfect, pattern planes. But 'when they had cut down-*

wards from the ceiling to a depth of about 4 feet at the
west end, and 13 feet at the east end, they stopped in
the very midst of their work. A small bored passage
was pushed on into the rock a few feet further towards
the south, and then that was also left unfinished and ;
a similar âbortive attempt, though downwards, was

begun, but probably in modern times, in the broken
rock of the uneven floor itself; the whole floor from
one end of the chamber to the other being left thus
a lamentable scene of confusion, verily (seeing that the
whole light of day was reduced down there to a mere
star-like point at the end of the long entrance passage),
verily, " the stones of darkness and the shadow of
death." (See Plate I. and Plate VIII.).
This one item of its internal construction, moreover,
there is good reason for believing, was all that the
Egyptians themselves knew of, from within a generation
after the Great Pyramid had been built, to the latest
times of their nation ; excepting only certain men who
Chap. VL] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 75
broke into the building at tbe epoch of, or near to, the
Persian invasion ; and for them see Part IV.
That the Egyptians themselves as a people knew
thus much, we may readily allow ; because they could
hardly have known less of the interior than the
Romans and there is proof, in the shape of good uncial
;
marked in carbon, and recorded to have been

letters
seen by Signor Caviglia when he first recovered in
modern times the re-entry to that part of the Pyramid,
that t}iey, the old Romans, were once inside the sub-
terranean chamber.
There appears also, it is asserted by some Egyptologists
of rather a sanguine turn of mind, some small pro-
bability that pyramids with this single characteristic
viz., a descending entrance passage and subterranean,
or call it positively, a sepulchral, chamber, but of poor

workmanship, were indigenous in Egypt before the
erection of the Great Pyramid which in that case,
;
therefore, began so far in deference to some native ideas ;
though, as will be seen presently, the Great Monument

did not care to complete tliem, nor carry out the either
intended or pretended sepulchral chamber to such a
condition of floor state, that any stone sarcophagus could
have been decently, and in order, established there.
In the undoubtedly subsequent second and third
Jeezeh pyramids, on the contrary, the subterranean
rooms "were finished, floors and all, and sarcophagi
introduced. Their architects, moreover, attempted to
adorn those chambers with a large amount of com-
plication but it was only useless and confusing com-
;
plication, without any very sensible object unless ;
when it was to allow a second king to make himself

a burial-chamber in the pyramid-cellar already occu-
pied by a predecessor and then it was bad. Gra-
;
dually, therefore, as the researches of Colonel Howard-

Vyse have shown, on the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh,
eighth, and ninth Jeezeh pyramids (all these being

very small ones, let it be remembered) the native
Egyptians dropped nearly everything else that they had
tried, except the one single, partly descending and
partly horizontal, passage, with a subterranean chamber
for burial purposes ; and that they kept to, so long as
they practised their petty pyramid building at all, most
religiously. (See Plate YI.)
Lepsius Law of Egyptian Pyramid Building.

Still further, that the making of such descending
passages with subterranean chambers, and using them
for sepulture, is what the Egyptians usually
precisely
did when they were their own masters and the directors
of their own works and that they did little more, except
;
it was to decorate them with images of false gods,
boasting inscriptions in hieroglyphic writing, and por-

traits- of themselves, is also testified to from quite
another quarter. For all the Egyptologists of our age,
French, English, German, and American, have hailed
the advent, on their stage of time, of the so-called
''
Lepsius' Law of Egyptian Pyramid Building ;" they
universally declaring that it satisfies absolutely all the
observed or known phenomena. And it may do so for
every known case of any Egyptian pyramid, excejpt the
Great Pyramid and there it explains nothing of w^hat
;
it chiefly consists in.

Taking, however, the cases which it does apply to,
viz., the profane Egyptian examples, this alleged "law"

pronounces, that the sole object of any Pyramid was
to —
form a royal tomb subterranean as a matter of
course —
and that operations began by making an in-
clined descending passage leading down into the rock,
and in cutting out anunderground chamber at the end
of it. The scheme thus begun below, went on also
Chap.VL] the great pyramid. 77
growing above ground every year of the king's reign,

by the placing there of a new heap or additional layer
of building stones, and piling them layer above layer
over a central, square-based nucleus upon the levelled
ground, vertically above the subterranean apartment
and it was finally {i.e., this superincumbent mass of
masonry) finished off on that king's death by his suc-
cessor,who deposited his predecessor's body embalmed
and in a grand sarcophagus in the underground cham-
ber, stopped up the passage leading to it, cased in the
rude converging sides of the building with bevelled
casing-stones so as to give it a smooth pyramidal form,
and left it and Pharaonic
in fact a finished Egyptian,
:
2)yramid to all and no mean realisation

posterity '''
either of prevailing ideas among some early nations, of
* In Dr. Lepsius' Letter 7, March, 1843, that eminent Egyptologist

says distinctly enough with regard to the above theory, — *' I discovered
the
riddle of pyramidal construction, on which I had been long employed ; "
but in the letterpress attached to Frith's large photographs of Egypt
(1860 ?), by Mrs. Poole and R. S. Poole, the discovery is given categorically
1o another person. As the passage is accompanied with a very clear
description of the theory, there may be advantage in giving it entire from
this opposite side ;as then proving beyond all doubt how much of the
whole internal arrangement of the Great Pyramid, as now known and
presently to be described, the approved pyramidal theory of the most
learned Egyptologists really accounts for :
"The principle of their (the ancient Egyptians) pyramid construction

was discovered by Mr. James Wild, the architect who accompanied the
l*russian expedition. A
rocky site was first chosen, and a space made
smooth, except a slight eminence in the centre, to form a peg upon which
the structure should be fixed. Within the rock, and usually below the
level of the future base, a sepulchral chamber was excavated, with a
passage, inclining downwards, leading to it from the north. Upon the
rock was first raised a moderate mass of masonry, of nearly a cubic form,
but having its four sides inclined inwards upon this a similar mass was
;
})laced, and around, other such masses, generally about half as wide. At
this stage the edifice could bo completed by a small pyramidal structure
being raised on the top, and the sides of the steps filled in, the whole
being ultimately cased, and the entrance passage, which had of course
been continued through the masonry, securely closed ; or else the work
could be continued on the same principle. In this manner it was possible
for the building of a pyramid to occupy the lifetime of its founder
without there being any risk of his leaving it incomplete (to any such
degree or extent as would afford a valid excuse for his successor neglecting
to perform his very moderate part, of merely filling up the angles, and
smoothing off generally)."
burying tlieir monarchs svih montihus altis, in impres-

sive quiet, immovable calm, and deep in the bosom of
motber earth.
Classic Antiquity on the Interior of the Great Pyramid.

There has been some scholastic question of late years,
whether Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, and others of 'the
ancients, or their immediate informants, were ever
actually inside the Great Pyramid for sometimes it has
;
been maintained that the edifice was inviolably sealed, and

that what they mentioned was only on the reports of
tradition ;while at other times it is averred that they
must have seen something more accurately than through
others' eyes, in order to have described so graphically
as they did describing, however, always a vast deal
;
more about the exterior than the interior. The very

utmost, indeed, that they had to say about the latter
was touching a certain removable stone, and then a
dark groping " usque ad," or right away to, the far sub-
terranean chamber where M. Caviglia in a.d. 1820,
as already mentioned, found blackened Eoman letter^
upon its roof;'''' and half the world has. seen, since then,
the unfinished, unquarried out floor or a room with an
;
excellent ceiling and walls too, so far as they go, but no

floor, if that be possible.
To that point, then, and through that descending pas-

sage also of the Great Pyramid, occasionally (and probably
only at very long intervals) various nations did penetrate,
aided by the removable block of stone. The machinery
of that sliding block and the opportunity of sometimes
working it, seemed to act as a safety-valve to the
Pyramid-curiosity of early times, which was thus ad-
mitted on rare occasions to see the interior of the
greatest of all the Pyramids ; and then, after frantic
* Howard- Vyse's "Pyramids," vol. ii. p. 290.
Chap. VI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 79
exertions, —
men saw and made acquaintance witli what ?
Nothing but a descending entrance passage and a sub-
terranean chamber ;that chamber which ought to have
been a sepulchral one according to both ordinary Egyp-
tian ideas, and the " Lepsius' Law," but was not. Con-
sistently too with the Lepsius theory, it should have been
the first thing finished about the whole mighty fabric,
but yet it was never even pretended to be finished at all
the very chamber which ought to have contained sar-
cophagus, mummy, paintings, and inscriptions, but which
only really held the rock contents of the lower part of
the room, not yet cut out of the bowels of the mountain.
In short, the classic nations knew nothing whatever
about the real interior of the Great Pyramid's scientific
design.
Medieval Arabian Learning on the Interior of the Great

Pyramids
In the course of the dark ages, even what Greece and
Kome once knew, was lost, besides the Pyramid being
issailed by driving storms of desert sand. Hence, when
the Callj^;^ al Mamoun, a Caliph with an inquiring turn of
mind, like his father Haroun al Kaschid, of the "Arabian
Nights," but attending to higher things — (indeed, he was
said by Gibbon to have been a prince of rare learning, '/con-
tinually exhorting his subjects in excelsior vein assidu-
ously to peruse instructive writings, and who not only
commanded the volumes of Grecian sages to be translated
into Arabic, but could assist with pleasure and modesty
at the assemblies and disputations of the learned")
when this British Association genius of his day then,
coming down from Bagdad to Cairo, desired to enter the
Great Pyramid, a.d. 820, there was only a very indistinct
rumour to guide him towards trying the northern,
rather than any other, side.
8o OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
«
But Al Mamoun, the then Propliet-descended ruler

of the Mohammedan world, was likewise flattered almost
as a god in the rhapsodies of his court poets. They,
inventing some new pleasure for him every day, could
only not give him the Great Pyramid itself. Emu-
lating, however, on a hasis of Coptic tradition derived
from the then innumerable Egyptian monasteries, the
enchanted tales of Bagdad, they drew gorgeous pictures
of the contents^ of the Pyramid's interior ; as well as of
the astounding history of that mighty and mysterious
triangular masonic fact, so patent as to its exterior in the
eyes of all Cairo, so recluse as to its interior against
both the world and time.
In describing these matters, most of the reciters
seemed only intent on putting in everything of value
they could possibly think of All the treasures of
" Sheddad Ben Ad," the great antediluvian king of the
earth, with all his medicines and all his sciences, they
declared were there, told over and over again. Others,
though, were positive that the founder-king was no other
than Saurid Ibn Salhouk, a far greater one than the
other; and these last gave many more minute particulars
some of which are at least interesting to. us in the
present day, as proving that amongst the Egypto-Arabians
of more than 1,000 years ago, the Jeezeh Pyramids,
headed by the grand one, enjoyed a pre-eminence of
fame vastly before all the other Pyramids of Egypt put
together and that if any other is alluded to after the
;
Great Pyramid (which has always been the notable and

favourite one, and chiefly was known then as the East
Pyramid), it is either the second one at Jeezeh, under
the name of the West Pyramid ; or the third one, dis-
tinguished as the Coloured Pyramid, in allusion to its
red granite, compared with the white limestone casings
of the other two ; which, moreover, from their more
near, but by no means exact, equality of size, went fre-
Chap. VI.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 8
quently under the affectionate de'signation of "the

pair."
But what seemed more to the purpose of Al Mamoun
at the time, was the very exact report of Ibn Abd
Alkokm, as to what was then still to be found in each
of these three Pyramids for this was what, according
;
to that most detailed author, the primeval King Saurid

had put into them and safely locked up though where ;
in the scanty hollow interior of any, or all, of the

Pyramids, he could have found space for so much, is
more than any one now knows.
" In the Western Pyramid, thirty treasuries, filled
with store of riches and utensils, and with signatures

made of precious and with instruments of
stones,
iron, and and with arms which rust not,
vessels of earth,
and with glass which might be bended and yet not
broken, and with strange spells, and with several kinds
of alakakivs (magical precious stones), single and double,
and with deadly poisons, and with other things besides.
" He made also in the East Pyramid divers celestial
spheres and stars, and what they severally operate in

their aspects, and the perfumes which are to be used to
them, and the books which treat of these matters.
"He put also into the Coloured Pyramid the com-
mentaries of the priests in chests of blauk marble, and
with every priest a book, in which the wonders of his
profession, and of his actions, and of his nature were
written and what was done in his time, and what is and
;
what shall be from the beginning of time to the end of it.

" He placed in every Pyramid a treasurer the ;
treasurer of the Westerly Pyramid was a statue of

marble stone, standing upright with a lance, and upon
his head a serpent wreathed. He that came near it, and
stood still, the serpent bit him of one side, and wreath-
ing round about his throat, and killing him, returned to
his place. He made the treasurer of the East Pyramid
G
an idol of black agate, his eyes open and shining,

sitting on a throne with a lance when any looked
;
upon him, he heard on one side of him a voice which

took away his sense, so that he fell prostrate upon his
face, and ceased not, till he died. •
" He made the treasurer of the Coloured Pyramid

a statue of stone, called alhui, sitting he which looked
;
towards it was drawn by the statue, till he stuck to it,

and could not be separated from it till such time as he
died."
Some of these features were certainly not encouraging
but then .they were qualified by other tale-reciters,
who described "three marble columns in the Great
Pyramid, supporting the images of three birds in flames
of fire of precious stones beyond all value and all
number. Upon the first column was the figure of a
dove, formed of a beautiful and priceless green stone
upon the second, that of a hawk, of yellow stone and ;
upon the third, the image of a cock, of red stone,

Avhose eyes enlightened all the place. Upon moving
the hawk, a gigantic door which was opposite, com-
posed of great marble slabs, beautifully put together,
and inscribed with unknown characters in letters of
gold, was raised and the same surprising connection
;
existed between the other images and their doors."

Exciting wonders, of course, appeared beyond those
strange portals but what need we to disentomb these
;
Arabian romances further ? In Egypt they believe pretty

seriously in enchantments and Jinn or Genii of marvel-
lous proportions still how much more then in the days
;
of the son of Haroun al Raschid, and when the Great

Pyramid Avas a mystery of old, fast sealed ? To ascer-
tain, therefore, what really existed inside it then, was
evidently a very definite and promising sort of labour
and why should not the young Caliph Al Mamoun
undertake it ?
Caliph Al Mamoun attacks the Northern Flank of the

Great Pyraimid.
He did and directed liis Mohammedan workmen

so,
to begin at themiddle of the northern side precisely, ;
says Sir Gardner Wilkinson, as the founders of the

Great Pyramid had foreseen, when they placed the en-
trance, not in themiddle of that side, but twenty-four
feet away Hard work, therefore, was it to
to the east.
these masons, quarrying with the crude instruments of
that barbarous time, into stone work as solid almost, at
that place, as the side of a hill.
They soon indeed began to cry out, " Open that won-
derful Pyramid It could not possibly be done !"
! But
the Caliph only replied, " I will have it most certainly
done." So his followers perforce had to quarry on un-
ceasingly by night and by day. Weeks after weeks, and
months too, were consumed in these toilsome exertions ;
the progress, however, though slow, was so persevering

that they had penetrated at length to no less than one
hundred feet depth from the entrance.
in But by
that time becoming thoroughly exhausted, and be-
ginning again to despair of the hard and hitherto fruit-
less labour, some of them ventured to remember cer-
tain improving tales of an old king, who had found on
a calculation, that all the wealth of Egypt in his time
would not enable him to destroy one of the Pyramids.
These murmuring disciples of the Arabian prophet were
thus almost becoming lOpenly rebellious, when one day,
in the midst of theii various counsel, they heard a
great stone evidently ftall in some hollow space, within
no more than a few feet from them !
In the fall of tliat particular stone there almost

seems to have been an accident that was more than an
accident.
Energetically they instantly pushed on in the direc-
tion of the strange noise ; hammers, and fire, and

vinegar heing employed again and again, until, breaking
through a wall surface, they burst into the hollow way,
" exceeding dark, dreadful to look at, and difficult to
pass," they said at first, where the sound had occurred.

It was the same hollow way, or properly the Pyramid's
entrance passage, where the Komans of old, and if they,
also Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, must have passed
up and down in their visits to the subterranean chamber
and its unfinished, unquarried out, floor. Tame and
simple used that entrance passage to appear to those
ancients, but now it stood before another race, and
another religion, with its chief leading secret, for the
first time since its foundation, nakedly exposed. A
large angular-fitting stone that had made for ages a
smooth and polished portion of the ceiling of the inclined
and narrow passage, quite undistinguishable from any
other part of the whole course, had now dropped on to
the floor before their eyes, and revealed that there was,
at and in that point of the ceiling, another passage,
clearly ascending towards the south, out of this descend-
ing one ! (See Plate VIII.)
But that ascending passage was closed, for all that,
by a granite portcullis, formed by a series of huge
granite plugs of square wedge-like shape dropped in,
or rather slided down and jammed immovably, from
above. To break them in pieces within the confined
entrance passage space, and pull out the fragments there,
was entirely out of the question so the grim crew of
;
Saracen Mussulmans broke away sideways or round about

to the west through the smaller masonry, and so up
again (by a huge chasm still to be seen) to the new
ascending passage, at a point past the terrific hardness of
itslower granite obstruction. They did up there, or at
an elevation above and position beyond the portcullis,
find the filling material of the ascending passage only
Chap. VI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 85
limestone; so making themselves a very great hole in

the masonry alongside, they there wielded their tools
with energy on the long fair blocks which filled that
passage-way. But as fast as they broke up and pulled
out the pieces of one of the blocks in this strange
ascending passage, other blocks above it, also of a
bore just to fill dimensions, slided down from
its full
above, and stillwhat should be the passage for

human locomotion was solid stone filling. No help,
however, for the workmen. The Commander of the
Faithful is present, and insists that, whatever the number
of stone plugs still to come down from the mysterious
reservoir, his men shall hammer and hammer them,
one after the other, and bit by bit to little pieces, until
they do at last come to the end of them. So the
people tire, but the work goes on and at last the
;
ascending passage beginning just above the granite

portcullis, is announced to be free from obstruction and
ready for essay. Then, by Allah, they shouted, the
treasures of the Great Pyramid, sealed up from the
fabulous times of the mighty Ibn Salhouk, and unde-
secrated, as it was long supposed, by mortal eye during
three thousand years, lay full in their grasp before them.
On they rushed, that bearded crew, thirsting for the
promised wealth. Up no less than 110 feet of the
steep incline, crouched hands and knees and chin
together, through a passage of royally-polished lime-
stone, but only 47 inches in height and 41 in breadth,
they had painfully to crawl, with their torches burning
low. Then suddenly they emerge into a long tall gallery,
of seven times the passage height, but all black as night
still ascending though at the strange steep angle, and
reaching away farther and still more far into the very
inmost heart of darkness of this imprisoning mountain
of stone. In front of them, at first entering here, and
on the level, se6 anothet low passage on their right
;
hand (see Plate XIII.) a black, ominous-looking well's

mouth, more than 140 feet deep, and not reaching water
but only lower darkness even then while onwards and
;
above them, a continuation of the glorious gallery or

hall of seven times, leading them up to the possession
of all the treasures of the great ones of the antediluvian
earth. Narrow, certainly, was the way only 6 feet—
broad anywhere, and contracted to 3 feet at the floor
— but 28 feet high, or almost above the power of their
smoky lights to illuminate ; and of polished, glistering,
marble-like, Cyclopean stone throughout. (See Plates
VIII, XL, and XII.)
That must surely be the high-road to fortune and
wealth. Up and up its long ascending floor-line, ascend-
ing at an angle of 26°, these determined marauders, with
their lurid fire-lights, had to push their dangerous and
slippery way for 150 feet more then an obstructing
;
three-foot step to climb over next a low doorway to bow

;
their heads beneath ;then a hanging portcullis to pass,

almost to creep under, most submissively then another ;
low doorway in awful blocks of frowning red granite

both on either side and above and below; but after that
they leapt without further let or hindrance at once into
the grand chamber, which was, and is still, the conclusion
of everything forming the Great Pyramid's interior the ;
chamber to which, and for which, and towards which,

according to every subsequent writer, in whatever other
theoretical point he may differ from his fellows, the
whole Great Pyramid was built. (See Plate XL)
And what find they there, those maddened Muslim
in Caliph Al Mamoun's train ? A right noble apart-
ment, now called the King's Chamber, 34 feet long, 17
broad, and 1 9 high, of polished red granite throughout,
both walls, floor, and ceiling in blocks squared and
;
true, and put together with such exquisite skill that the
joints are barely discernible to the closest inspection.
Chap. VL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 87
Ay, ay, no doubt a well-built room, and a handsome

one too but what does it contain ?
; What is the trea-
sure ? The treasure yes indeed, where are the silver
!
and the gold, the jewels, medicines, and arms ? These

fanatics look wildly around them, but can see nothing,
not a single dirhem anywhere. They trim their torches,
and carry them again and again to every part of that
red-walled, flinty hall, but without any better success.
Nought but pure, polished red granite, in mighty slabs,
looks upon them from every side. The room is clean,
garnished too, as it were and, according to the ideas
;
of its founders, complete and perfectly ready for its

visitors, so long expected, so long delayed. But the
gross minds who occupy it now, find it all barren and ;
declare that there is nothing whatever for them, in the

whole extent of the apartment from one end to another ;
nothing except an empty stone chest without a lid.

The Caliph Al Mamoun was thunderstruck. He
had arrived at the very ultimate part of the Great
Pyramid he had so long desired" to take possession of
and had now, on carrying it by storm, found absolutely
nothing that he could make any use of, or saw any value
in. So being signally defeated, though a Commander
of the Faithful, his people began muttering against
him and to exclaim, too, in most virtuous phrases
;
of religious repentance upon both their own waste of

time, and the treason and treachery of some one.
But Al Mamoun was a Caliph of the able day of
Eastern rulers ;so he had a large sum of money
secretly brought from his treasury and buried by night
in a certain spot. Next day he caused the men to dig
precisely there, and behold !although they were only
digging in the Pyramid masonry just as they had
been doing during so many previous days, yet on this
day they found a treasure of gold ; ''and the Caliph or-
dered it to be counted, and lo ! it was the exact sum
that had been incurred in the works, neither more nor

less. And the Caliph was astonished, and said he could
not understand how the kings of the Pyramid of old,
before the Deluge, could have known exactly how much
money he would have expended in his undertaking,
and he was lost in surprise." But as the workmen got
paid for their labour, and cared not whose gold they
were paid with so long as they did get their wage, they
ceased their complaints. While as for the Caliph, he
returned to his city home, musing on the wonderful
events that had happened and both the King's Chamber
;
and the '' granite chest without a lid " were troubled
by him no more.
The poets of El Kahireh did indeed tune their lutes
once again, and celebrate their learned j)atron's discoveries
in that lidless box of granite. According to some of
them, a dead man with a breast-plate of gold, and an
emerald vase a foot in diameter, and " a carbuncle which
shone with a light like the light of day, and a sword of
inestimable value and 7 spans long, with a coat of mail
1 2 spans in length " (all of them very unlike an Egyp-
tian mummy of the usual type), rewarded his exertions;
though, according to others, the chest' was really
crammed to the brim with coined gold " in very large
;
pieces " while on the cover, which others again main-
tained was not there then and 'is certainly not to be
seen was written in Arabic characters, "Abou
now,
Amad built this Pyramid in 1,000 days." But nothing
further of importance was actually done in a cause
which men began now to deem, in spite of their poets,
to be absolutely worthless, and in a region more pro-
fitless to all mere sensualists than the desert itself.
The way of approach, however, once opened by Al

Mamoun, remained then free to all and " men did ;
enter it," says one of the honestest chroniclers of that

day, for many years, and descended by the slippery
'*
Chap. YL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 89
;
passage which is in" but with no other result than
it
this, ''
that some of them came out safe and others
died."
Reaction after the Exciteifnent
A still more edifying account,

in a moral and cor-
rectional point of view, was attempted by one *' Masondi
in the Akbar-Ezzeman," writing, one would think, for
children of tender years for this is the burden of his tale.
;
''
Certain explorers who had formed a party," said he,
" discovered in the lowest part of the Great Pyramid
a square chamber, wherein was a vase containing a

quantity of fluid of an unknown quality. The walls
of the chamber were composed of small square stones
of beautiful colours, and a person having put one of
these stones into his mouth, was suddenly seized with
a pain in his ears, which continued until he had re-
placed it. They also discovered in a large hall a
quantity of golden coins put up in columns, every
piece of which was of the weight of 1,000 dinars.
They tried to take the money^ but were not able to
move it. In another place they found the image of
a sheikh, made of green stone, sitting upon a sofa, and
wrapped up in a garment. Before him were statues
of little boys, whom he was occupied in instructing.
The discoverers tried to take up one of these figures,
but they were not able to move it. Continuing their
researches, they came to a female idol of white stone,
with a covering on her head, and lions of stone on
each side attempting to devour her on seeing which ;
they were so immensely frightened, that they took to

flight. This happened," the educational sage Masondi
is particular to record, in order to clinch its date, " in
the time of Yerid Ben Abdullah ; though who ho was,
is a problem."
Another writer aims at the Caliph himself, who is
described in the third person, as " one who employed

three years, and considerable endeavouring
sums, in
to enter Pyramid, and who found little or no
the
treasure; but saw an inscription in letters of gold on
the side of the chamber, declaring that "the impious
violator of the tomb should experience, as his sole
reward, the regret of having committed a sacrilegious
action without any successful result." While, finally, a
surveying British general officer of the Koyal Engineers,
determined to bend the bow the other way, freely an-
nounces in 1869 that the king's body (that is, Cheops'),
after a repose of 2,960 years, was thrown out of its
tomb by Al Mamoun, and " treated with grossest indig-
nities by the rabble of the streets of Cairo."
But something like the sober chronicles
to return to
of the period, it was years after the Caliph's assault on
the inside of the Pyramid, that there began that de-
spoiling of its outside which was carried on by many
generations of Cairenes systematically, until all the
white and polished blocks of the casing (except the
two which Colonel Howard-Yyse was to bring to
light 1,000 years afterwards) had been removed
for the building of new Cairo ; and the grand old
primeval inscription on the outside of the Pyramid,
" engraved," somewhere about the days of Job, " with
an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever," what —
became of it and what would it have told if translated
:
by a more able linguist and impartial judge, than the

idolatrous Egyptian priest who put ofP Herodotus with
an idle jest ?
The, Euro'pean Mind enters into the Question.
Centuries passed by, and then modern European

began to look in at the Great P^âmid.
travellers The
Eastern day-dream of wealth had departed, but that
empty stone chest still offered itself there in the interior
Chap. VL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 91
for explanation. Why was it in such a place of honour ?

Why was the whole Pyramid arranged in subservience
to it ? Why was it so unpretending and plain ? Why
had its lid been forgotten ? Why was the whole thing
empty ? Why was it utterly without inscription ?
Gradually the notion grew that it might be a sarco-
phagus that it was a sarcophagus and that it had
; ;
been intended for " that Pharaoh who drove the Israel-
ites out of Egypt and who, in the end, leaving his
;
carcase in the Red Sea, never had the opportunity of

being deposited in his own tomb."
But this idea was effectually quashed, for, amongst
other reasons, this cogent one, — that the Great Pyramid
was not only but had been sealed up too in all its
built,
more even of that
special portions, long before the birth
Pharaoh. Nay, before the birth of Isaac and Jacob as
well which disposes likewise of the attempt to call the
;
Great Pyramid " the tomb of Joseph," whose mortal

remains being carried awây by the Israelites in their
Exodus, left the vacancy we now see in the coffer or
stone box.
Then wrote some, " here was buried King Cheops, or
Chemmis, but his body hath been removed hence."
Whereupon Professor Greaves pointed out " that Dio-
dorus hath left, above 1,600 years since, a memor-
able passage concerning Chemmis, the builder of the
Great Pyramid, and Cephren, the founder of the work
adjoining : ''Although," saith he, " these kings intended
these for their sepulchres, yet it happened that neither
of them were buried there. For the people being

exasperated against them by reason of the toilsomeness
of these works, and for their cruelty and oppression,
threatened to tear in pieces their dead bodies, and with
ignominy to throw them out of their sepulchres. Where-
upon both of them, dying, commanded their friends to
bury them in an obscure place."
92 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Paut II.
And again, other scliolars brought up the very clear

account of Herodotus, that King Cheops was not buried
in the Great Pyramid building above, because he was
buried in a totally different place viz., "
in a subter-
;
ranean region on an island always surrounded by the

waters of the Nile." And if that necessarily and
hydraulically means a level into which the Nile water
could always flow, it must have been at a depth of
more than fifty feet below the very bottom of even the
unfinished subterranean chamber carveddeep in the
rock underneath the Great Pyramid, and not in the
direction of the grand, upper, built room with its empty
stone chest discovered by Al Mamoun in the sub-aerial
masonry of the building.
The Tomhic Theory.
So in later years, all the single sarcophagus propo-

empty stone chest having
sitions for the benefit of the
failed, they have been merged into a sort of general
sarcophagus theory, that some one must have been
buried there. And this notion finds much favour with
the hierologists and Egyptologists, as a school ; for these
gentlemen will insist on keeping up a hold over the
Great Pyramid, as being a valuable part of their art, and
a grand chariot to drive withal before the wondering
gaze of mankind. They allow, that in no other pyramid
is the sarcophagus —
as they boldly call the stone
chest, or granite box, or porphyry coffer (though it is not
—
porphyry either) of other authors contained high up in
the body of the Pyramid, far above the surface of the
ground outside that in no other case is it perfectly
;
devoid of adornment or inscription that in no other

;
case has the lid so strangely vanished in no other case

;
are the neighbouring walls and passages of the Pyramid

so devoid of hieratic and every other emblem in fact. ;
Chap. VI.] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 93
tliey allow that the red granite coffer, with all that part
of the Pyramid's chambers and ascending passages where
it is found, and which opened itself so strangely to
the eyes of the Arabians after
3,000 years of con-
cealment, is and peculiar to the Great
entirely unique
Pyramid. The coffer and its chamber, the Grand
Gallery and the passages leading to it, form indeed a
sort of machinery which is altogether in addition to
what the other pyramids possess while what they have,
;
the Great Pyramid has also, though it never completed

and used it viz., the subterranean chamber and descend-
;
ing passage intended to be — sepulchral-notion inspiring,

or sepulchral, if you will, but never finished —though
left enterable at any time through all antiquity.
Observe also with the alleged " sarcophagus," in the
Kings Chamber (for so is that apartment now most
generally, though perhaps erroneously, termed), that
there was no ancient attempt to build the vessel up and
about in solid masonry, in the most usual manner for
securing a dead body inviolate. On the contrary, there
were magnificently built white stone passages of a most
lasting description, and in a different material to the
rest of the fabric, as well as fit for continued use
through long ages, leading straight up to such sarco-
phagus from the very entrance itself while, more notably,
;
the shapely King's Chan^ber was intended to be ventilated

"
in the most admirable manner by the " air channels
discovered by Colonel Howard- Vyse evidently (as the ;
actual fact almost enables us to say with security) in

order that men might come there from time to time,
and look on, and deal with, that open granite chest,
and live and not die.
But how is it known, or can it be proved, that there
are not similar secret chambers in the other pyramids
also?
Something may be done in this way ; firstly, with
94 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IT.
tlie example of the Great Pyramid to go by, during

1,000 years, the other j^yramids have been abundantly
examined, and industriously probed for like features,
regardless of expense, but without success. In the
second place, some of the others have become dilapi-
dated to an extent that should show such chambers if
they were there and in the third place, whereas the
;
third Pyramid of Jeezeh has been admired by some

authors* as the third and most perfect work of the
true Egyptian pyramid builders, where every excellence
of their system was introduced, that very pyramid was
bored centrally and vertically through by Colonel
Howard- Vyse without detecting anything but solid
masonry until its subterraneans were finally reached ;
and then the scene partook decidedly of Egypt the

profape, with a richly ornamented sarcophagus and an
idolatrous dedication in Mizraite hieroglyphics on the
coffin board.
What then Avas the purpose of all that upper system
in the Great Pyramid, above its one entrance passage
which descends ultimately to the lower, or underground
chamber ? Why too was not that unique upper system
of sub-aerial chambers. Grand Gallery, .and ascending
passages made easy of access to Egyptians, Persians,
Greeks, and Komans in their time ; why was
or rather,
it and scrupulously concealed from every one
so entirely
of them through all their long historical day ?
Hieroglyphics, and their modern Egyptologist inter-
preters, are plainly at fault here for, always excepting
;
the quarry-marks in strokes of red paint on the un-

finished stones in the black hollows of construction, there
are no hieroglyphics to translate upon either the granite
coffer, the chamber which contains it, or even the whole
of the Great Pyramid. Nor has anything, in all hiero-
glyphic literature throughout all Egypt, ever been dis-
* H. C. Agnew, ''Letters on the Pyramids," 1838.
CHAr. VI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 95
covered throwing the smallest light on, or displaying

the most distant knowledge of, the ascending interior of
this one, most unique, of all the pyramids.
The Exclusively Tomhic Theory receives a Shake.
Meanwhile, some few good men and true in scientific

—
researches M. Jomard
witness De- in the celebrated "
and
scription de I'Egypte," Gardner Wilkinson
Sir in his
own works —have begun doubts
to express occasional as
to whether any dead body of a king or other mortal
man ever was deposited in the strangely-shaped vessel
of the King's Chamber.
.The actual words of that most philosophic Egypto-
logist, Sir G. Wilkinson, are :
" The authority of Arab
writers is not always to be relied on and it may be ;
doubted whether the body of the king was really

deposited sarcophagus;" i.e., of the Great
in the
Pyramid and the remark, so far, is unassailable. But
;
when he goes on to say, " I do not presume to explain

the real object for which the pyramids were built, but
feel persuaded that they served for tombs, and were
also intended for astronomical purposes," why then it
is plain that he is mixing up two very different things,
viz., the one Great, pure and anti-Egyptian Pyramid,
with any number of other pyramids truly and absolutely

Egyptian and Pharaonic.
Another Egyptologist, of less mature years, but loud
in talk, rushes in thus heedlessly where his better,
with reason, had feared to tread, declaring, " The
pyramids were in all cases tombs, and nothing more.
That they were places of sepulture is enough, to any
one acquainted with the character of the ancient
Egyptians, to prove that they had no other use ; but
were it not so, our knowledge of their structure would
afford conclusive evidence." And then follows that
96 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt IL
author's knowledge of their structure, and it leaves out,

neatly and completely, though painted by his own
admiring that is peculiar to the Great Pyramid.
self, all
Now was precisely when another, viz. M. Jomard,

it
was studying that grand phenomenon's peculiar features,

and comparing them day after day with the ordinary
forms of old Egyptian pyramids, that he, discussing
the matter at leisure with the other members of the
French Academy then in Egypt, began shrewdly to
suspect that the object of both the coffer itself, and the
place it was in, " might be entirely and totally dif-
ferent " from either the treasure-theory of the East, or
sepulchral, i.e. tomhic, theory of Western minds :and
would probably prove, if correctly understood, to be
something gifted with a very high value indeed for
nations who were far advanced in civilisation and in-
tellectuality. He even fancied that it might have some-
thing to do with a standard measure of length, and
believed at one time that he had detected an analogy
to the then new French metre on one part of the coffer.
Something of a metrological kind had also been
speculated on by Sir Isaac Newton more than a century
earlier ;and though sufficiently accurate measures at
last failed him, yet he did succeed in getting out, so
far as he had foundations to go on at all, a number of
instances indicating with much probability that certain
harmonious proportions of a fixed measure of length
were generally adhered to in the formation of many of
the Pyramid's passages and chambers.
Yet, notwithstanding this good beginning, little more
was subsequently tried by any one else in the same
direction. The crowd in society still belonged to either
the treasure, or the tombic, school and both parties
;
were equally offended at the poverty of the contents of

the chamber in general, and the lidless granite chest in
particular.
Eacli had expected riches after their own heart's desire

and instead of them, merely found this plain stone box,
made indeed, they allowed, with exquisite geometric
truth, rectangular within and without, highly polished,
and of a fine bell-metal consistency, in a sort of hard,
compact, faultless, syenitic granite but then it was ;
empty, they said, and the lid was gone? So they were
all grievously offended at it, and are so still one man, :
as an example of the and educated

civilised, wealthy,
modern Europeans, hits the coffer a bang with a big
hammer, merely to hear over again what fifty persons
had recorded before him, viz., "that it rings like a
bell on being struck ;" another actually breaks off a
j)ortion for a " specimen " another tries to do the
;
same and cannot, though he tries with all his might

and though the Anglo-Indian soldiers under General Sir
David Baird succeeded only too well.'" While, finally.
Dr. Lepsius, whom Gliddon states with pride, " has been
justly termed by the great Letronne, the hope of
Egyptian study,'' planted a young palm-tree in the
hollow of the ancient coffer, to act as a German
Christmas-tree ; a on whose branches
gracious tree,
he should hang some baubles which he had bought
in Cairo, as presents for himself and his Prussian
friends whom he fondly calls " children of the wilder-
;
ness," on the strength of having been resident for a

few weeks in the comfortable parts of Lower Egypt.
John Taylor 8 Theory,

In the midst of such scenes, illustrating, unfortu-
nately, what is actually going on among the Egypto-
logists in the nineteenth century, comes out the late
John Taylor with the result of his long researches and ;
suggests that, "The coffer in the King's Chamber of

* "Description de I'Egypte; " and Dr. Clarke in his Travels; but
defended against them by Colonel Howard- Vyse.
H
98 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IL
the Great Pyramid was intended to be a standard

measure of capacity and weight fit for all nations; and
certain nations did originally receive their weights and
measures from thence ; so that those of them who
still preserve, more or with their lan-
less successfully,
guage and history their hereditary weights and measures,
may yet trace their pre-historic connection substantially
with that one primeval, standard, metrological centre,
the Great Pyramid."
Take, for instance, our own case. When the British
farmer measures the wheat which the bounty of Pro-
vidence has afforded him as the increase of his land,
in what terms does he measure it ? In quarters.
Quarters Quarters of what ?
!
The poor farmer does not know for there is no ;
capacity measure now on the Statute-book above the

quarter but, from old custom, he calls his largest
;
corn measure a quarter.

Whereupon John Taylor adds in effect "The quarter :
corn measures of the British farmer are fourth parts or

quarters of the contents of the coffer in the King's
Chamber of the Great Pyramid ; and the same Pyra-
mid's name, instead of being descended from irvp, fire,
may rather have been derived from Trvpo^, wheat, and

jiieTpov, measure ; measure of wheat.'
signifying a '
To establish ground-work of an international

the
standard to that end, though not at that time to
publish it generally, would seem to have been a leading
purpose of the Great Pyramid ages ago and the true ;
value, in size, of its particular measure, has not sen-

sibly deteriorated during all the varied revolutions of
society in the last 4,040 years 1"
This is a statement requiring full examination.
Chap. VII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 99
CHAPTER YII.
THE PYKAMID COFFER.
rFHE first part of the problem now immediately before

-- us should be both short and simple for it is, ;
merely to determine the cubical contents of the vessel

known successively or variously as " the sarcophagus,
the empty box, the lidless stone chest," or more philo-
sophically and safely, so as not to entangle ourselves
with any theory, "the coffer" in the King's Chamber
of the Great Pyramid " the only and one thing," says
;
that quaint old traveller, G. Sandys, *' which this huge

mass containeth within his darksome entrails."*
Reported of a plain rectangular figure within and
without, carved out of a single block of moderate size
;
therefore for a man examine and survey, and acces-

to
sible on every side, what should present so easy an ad-
measurement for any educated man to make, as this
coffer of the Great Pyramid ? How often, too, has
it not been admeasured, and by some of the most
learned academicians of Europe ? even as though they
all held firmly that it had been originally designed
and constructed only for that one end, purpose, and

intention.
From Colonel Howard-Vyse's important work are
drawn forth and arranged, in the following table, the
* George Sandys' "A Eelation of a Journey begun a.d. 1610."

chief measures which have been taken between 1550

and 1840 A. D., some of the principal authors being con-
sulted in their original writings. Their measures, generally
given in feet, or feet and inches, or metres,* are all here
Modern Measures or the Great Pyramid-Coffer up to a.d. 1864.

Chap. VÎL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. loi
regularly formed and exquisitely prepared specimen of

ancient mechanical art.
Reflections on the Numbers as measured.

Look at them, then. Surely the list is not a little
appalling. An ordinary carpenter amongst us talks of

sixteenths of an inch and sometimes
quite fluently,
undertakes to make work " fit
a special piece of cabinet
to half a sixteenth " but our learned travellers commit
:
errors of many whole inches and this when they are

;
measuring the one and only internal art-object which

the Great Pyramid contains, and on which indeed its
whole structure focusses and concentrates itself a ;
building too where no less than forty centuries are be-

holding their proceedings, just as they are said to have
done with admiration those of the French soldiers in
1799 ;* but are also, in these now quiet times, weigh-
ing rich travellers, learned philosophers, and modern
education in the balance of truth together.
My own part here must be very moderate ; for I am
a would-be measurer too, never perfectly exact. Yet
even I have to say, after the most favourable considera-
tion possible, that out of the twenty-five quoted authors
no less than twenty-two must be discharged summarily
as quite incompetent, whatever their mental attainments
otherwise, to talk before the world about either size or
proportion in any important practical matter. These
rejected ones have also been, to so lamentable an extent,
uniformly persevering in the error of only applying
their measures directly to the exterior of the coffer,
when the interior is the really valuable feature for

theory and use (and the more lasting fact of the
is
two, as a measure, because protected from injury by

* " Soldats du haut de cea Pyramides quarante
! sidclos vous con-
templcut."— Xapoloou iu Egypt.^^
the very existence of the exterior), that one is com-

pelled at last to doubt these men's very principles of
proceeding as well as every practical outcome of their
measuring skill.
Professor Greaves in 1638, the French academicians

in 1799, and Colonel Howard-Yyse in 1837, are there-
fore the only three names that deserve to live, as coffer
measurers, in the course of 250 years of legions of
visitors. Of these three parties thus provisionally
accepted, the foremost position might have been expected
for the academicians of Paris. Professor Greaves lived
before the day of European science proper, and when
Ptolemy's works, with sundry Arabian authors, were
almost the only books thought worthy of study after the
classical writers of Greece and Kome, and one or two of
re-arising Italy and simply because there were so very
;
few others. While Colonel Howard-Yyse did not lay

himself out for very refined measurements, but rather
went through what he felt himself obliged to undertake
in that direction, in the same fearless, thorough-going,
and artless manner in which the Duke of Wellington was
accustomed to review a picture exhibition in London
beginning with No. 1 in the catalogue, and going
through with the whole of them conscientiously to the
very last on the list.
The Colonel's measures, therefore, are respectable and
solidly trustworthy with regard to large quantities, but
not much more.
With the French academicians it is quite another
thing ; they were the men, and the successors of the
men, who had been for generations measuring arcs of
the meridian, and exhausting all the refinements of
microscopic bisections and levers of contact in determin-
ing the precise length of standard scales. Their mea-
sures, therefore, ought to be true to the thousandth,
and even the ten-thousandth part of an inch and :
Chap. VII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 103
perhaps tliey are so in giving the length and breadth of

the coffer ; but, alas ! in their statements of the depth,
both inside and Out, there seems to have been some
incomprehensible mistake committed, amounting to
nearly three whole inches.
I have looked up the original authorities in the
" Description de I'Egypte," have reduced the metre to
inches from several different copies, but cannot come to

any other conclusion than that this vital portion of the
Academy's work is hugely erroneous. Their length
and breadth numbers are not far from a mean of good
modern observers but those for the depth are outside
;
all other good men, in the most improbable manner to
be true. I have written to the Perpetual Secretary of

the Academy in Paris upon the subject, but have got no
answer and all my attempts to prevail on friends to
;
seek admission to the original documents of the Egyp-

tian expedition, if still in existence, have failed.
Under such circumstances, I have been compelled to
discharge the French Academy also, from the list of
fully trustworthy competitors for usefulness and fame in
Pyranid coffer metrology. Only two names, therefore,
are left —
Howard- Vyse, who has been already charac-
terised, and Greaves, in whom we have most fortunately
a hos: indeed.
Of Professor Greaves, the Oxford Astronomer in 1637.
He lived,no doubt, before the full birth of European

science, but on the edge of an horizon which is eventful
in scientific history. Immediately behind him were, if
not the dark ages, the scholastic periods of profitless
verbal disquisitions and in front, to be revealed after
;
liis death, were the germs of the mechanical and natural
I)hilosophy which have since then changed the face of

the world. There is no better a life-point that can be
taken than Greaves', whereby to judge what Europe has

gained by the exercise of civil and religious liberty,
coupled with the study of nature direct, through two and
a half centuries of unrestricted opportunity. When as
much more time has passed over the world, as now
separates us from Greaves' age, then —
say many of the
safest interpreters of the sacred prophecies a further —
Divine step in the development of the Christian dispen-
commenced.
sation will have
But of Greaves himself, it was somewhat strange,
though not inexplicable,''" that he should make the
* He relates his ideas, to a certain extent, thus in the "Pyramido-

graphia " :
*'
These proportions of the chamber, and those which follow of the
length and breadth of the hollow part of the tomb, were taken by me
with as much exactness as it was possible to do which I did so mach the
;
more diligently, as judging this to be the fittest place for fixing the
—
measure for posterity a thing which hath been much desired by learned
men but the manner how it might be exactly done hath been thought
;
of by none. I am of opirion that, as this Pyramid hath stood 3,000 years

almost " (this material under-estimaie for what is nearer 4,000 years,
arose from a mistaken theory of Professor Greaves for idertifying
Herodotus's name of the Jeezeh Pyramid-builders, Cheops, Chefren, and
Mycerinus, with kings of Manetho's twentieth, in place of his fourth,
dynasty), '* and is no whit decayed within, so it may continue many
thousand years longer; and, therefore, that after-times measuring these
places by the assigned, may hereby find out the just dimensions of tha
English feet. Had seme of the ancient mathematicians thought of this
way, these times would not have been so much perplexed in discovering
the measures of the Hebrews, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and other
nations." Greaves, vol. i. p. 126.
At p. 346, in the conclusion of his "Denarius " dissertation. Professor
Greaves gives the following special instances of his measui-es, which
should all be repeated at the earliest opportunity :
" The and most easterly of the three great Pyramids in Egypt
first
hath on the north side a square descent when you are entered a little
;
past the mouth of it, there is a joint or line, made by the meeting of two
smooth and polished stones over your head, which are parallel to tiose
under your feet the breadth of that joint or line is 3-463 of the English
;
foot" r= 41-556 Greaves' English inches.

*'
Within the Pyramid, and about the midst of it, there is a fair room
or chamber, the top of which is flat, and covered with nine massy stoaes ;
in it there stands a hollow tomb of one entire marble stone ; the length
of the south side of this room, at the joint or line where the first and
second rows of the stone meet, is 34-380 feet"
*' The breadth of
= 412-560 G. E. inch«s.
the west side of the same room, at the joint or line
where the first and second row of stones meet, is 17"190 feet " =206-280
G. E. inches. .
i
'
Chap.VXL] the great pyramid. 105
gi'eatexertion he did to visit the Pyramids in the

dangerous times of 1688 and 1639 and should, as ;
some of his contemporaries tauntingly observed, though

he was a professor of astronomy, take so much more
care in providing himself with a linear measuring-rod,
than with any astronomical instruments proper. But
the use which he made of that same measuring-rod
(" a ten-foot radius, most accurately divided into
10,000 parts, besides some other instruments, for the
fuller discovery of the truth "), when he had entered
the Pyramid, and approached the granite coffer of the
King's Chamber, has something in it which is passing
strange indeed.
Almost every other visitor, both before and since,
paid vastly more attention to the exterior than the
interior of the coffer. Why, then, did Professor
Greaves, when engaged on the merely give
it in feet and inches, as thus,
—
exterior,
" the exterior
superficies of it contains in length seven feet three
inches and a half, — in depth it is three feet three
inches and three-quarters, and is the same in breadth " ?
But when he comes to the interior, why does he imme-
diately address himself to it, as to a matter requiring
vastly more accuracy than all that he had been looking
to before? " Of the hollow, therefore, within," the
coffer —
or, as he calls it, " the king's monument," he —
writes, " It is in length on the west side, six feet, and
four hundred and eighty -eight parts of the English foot,
divided into a thousand parts" (that is, 6 feet, and
488 of 1,000 parts of a foot) "in breadth at the north
;
end, two feet, and two hundred and eighteen parts of

the foot divided into a thousand parts " (that is, 2 feet
and 218 of 1,000 parts of the English foot.) "The
" The hollow, or inner part of the marble tomb near the top, on the
west side of it, is in length 6-488 feet " =
77*856 G. E. inches.
" The hollow, or inner parfc of the marble tomb near the top of it, on
the north side, is in breadlh 2-218 feet" =
26-616 G. E. inches.
io5 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
deptli is 2 feet and 860 of 1,000 parts of the English

foot."
And he defends his practice in this instance by
adding "In the reiteration of these numbers, if any
:
shall be offended either with the novelty or tediousness

of expressing them so often, I may justify myself by the
example of Ulug Beg, nephew of Timurlane the Great
(for so is his name, and not Tamerlane), and Emperor
of the Moguls, or Tatars (whom we term amiss Tartars).
For I find in his astronomical tables (the most accurate
of any in the East), made about two hundred years
since, the same course observed by him when he writes
of the Grecian, Arabian, and Persian epochas, as also
those of Cataia and Turkistan. He expresseth the
numbers have done
at large, as I ; then in figures, such
as we call Arabian, which manner
, I judge
worthy of imitation, in all such numbers as are radical,
and of more than ordinary use."
Oreaves and Vyses Coffer Capacity Beterininations.
Exactly why, or fully wherefore, it was put into the

heart of the mediaeval Oxford Professor of Astronomy to
consider, contrary to the usual ideas of other scientific
visitors and admeasurers, the numbers for the interior of
the coffer so extra-remarkably "radical and of more
than ordinary use," we may come to form an opinion by-
and-by but in the meantime we should accept the fact
;
with thankfulness, as the very thing of all others which

is directly to the point, where a measure of capacity is
concerned.'"' Hence we have for the cubical contents of
* To preserve that humility which is equally necessary to insure ulti-

mate success in the paths of scientific research, and in a certain narrower
and more important way as well, it should be known to Professor Greaves'
countrymen that in his comparatively careless treatment of the exterior
of the coffer, he made an error of about one inch in the height, and some-
what more in the length.
Chap. VIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 107
the coffer in English inches, from Greaves' original

measures, in 1638
77-856 X 26-616 X 34-320 = 71,118.
And by Howard-Yyse's measures, also just as taken in

1837— 780 X 26-5 x 345 71,311. =
Several small corrections may possibly be applicable to
these mere numbers as rudely read off; but for the
present we may provisionally accept for a first approxi-
mation the simple mean of the above statements, or
71,214 cubic inches, as the apparent capacity contents
of the coffer of- the King's Chamber.
Wherefore now, what proportion does that number
bear to the capacity of four modern English corn quar-
ters, in terms of which British wheat is measured and
sold at this very hour ?

Eeferring to the almanac for the Act of Parliament on
the subject, we find in our copy a declaration, that the
gill "is equal to 8 '6 5 5 cubic inches ;" and then going-
through the continued multiplications for pints, quarts,

&c., up to four quarters, we have for that collective
quantity, 70,9 83 6 80 cubic inches. But in another
copy, one gallon is declared 277 '274 cubic inches;
which, being similarly multiplied for bushels, quarters,
and four quarters, yields 70,982-144 English cubic
inches.
Preferring, then, this latter quantity as having under-
gone less multiplying than the other, the degree of
agreement between a quarter British and a fourth part
of the coffer, or granite box, and possible type of a corn-
measure in the Great Pyramid, is at this present time as
17,746 17,801.
:
Qualities of the Coffers "Quarter" Measure,

A suflficiently fair amount of agreement is this, between
the things compared (viz., the Pyramid coffer on one
ibJ OUJi INHERITANCE IN [Part il. I
side divided into four by not very modern savants, and I
on the other, the old Anglo-Saxon corn-measure after

being too often " adjusted "
by Acts of Parliament,
since halcyon days of rest when Edgar " the
those j
peaceable " reigned over England at Winchester) suf- ;
ficiently near, I repeat, to allow all friends of worthy old

John Taylor to say that the Great Pyramid, with its
coffer of four corn-quarter capacity yet measurable, is

in still capable of fulfilling the purpose of its
so far
ancient name, —
under one form of interpretation at
least and if there be after all anything in any word or
:
name more worthy the attention of science, than

ancient contemporary mechanical facts that may still be
handled and measured before our eyes.
To nations in a more or less primitive condition, the
first application of capacity measures would, with little
doubt, be in the exchange of corn ; and through what-

ever subsequent stage of power or luxury or refinement
they may pass, the measuring of the staff of life will
probably still keep up a permanent iajj|)brtance over every
other object of measuring or weighing, even though it
be of drugs, or silver, or gold, —
in perfect accordance
so far with our Lord's Prayer, where the only material
supplication is, " Give us day by day our daily hreadJ'
Yet it is to be remarked, that if any given means for
measuring corn were devised by a very superior intelli-
gence, they should eventually be found applicable also,
so far as principles of accuracy go, to many of the more
artificial and precise purposes to which the after pro-
gress of mankind may introduce them, as well as to the
rude original employ.
Thus, the moon, with its frequently recurring varia-
tions and phases, serves man in the savage, and did
serve him in the primitive and patriarchal state, as a
coarse method of chronicling time over a few months.
In a more artificial and civilised condition, some of the
Chap. VII.J THE GREAT PYRAMID. 09
larger cycles of lunations enable him to speak exactly

of many years at a and approximate to some
time,
eclipses. In a further advanced condition, the moon's
subsidiary features of movement enable the sailor
in the midst of the broad surface of ocean, assisted
by data from the astronomer and mathematician on
shore, to measure his precise longitude. And amongst
the ablest minds of the present day, the theory of those
movements and the computation of their nature, forms
an arena where every man may measure off his own
intellectual height at the base of an infinite cliff which
he may never hope to stand on the summit of.
In exact proportion, therefore, as man has become
able to profit by God's moon, which he, man, was
originally told was merely intended to rule the night, so
has the divinely appointed luminary been found capable
of more and more applications and whenever any
;
difficulty has occurred, it has never been any want of

perfect accuracy in the lunar machinery itself (for that
really seems infinite), but merely in the power of man
to interpret the working of it.
Is there, then, anything approaching to the same
suggestive principle connected with John Taylor's idea
of the " corn measure " of the Great Pyramid ?
There can be no harm in inquiring, as we proceed
with our grand research and it will be the surest way
;
too of guarding against any possibility of our having

been misled thus far, by attending overmuch to some
single fortuitous coincidence.
Let us conclude this chapter, however, of rather old,
and much improvable data about the coffer's dze, by a
glance at the material of this most interesting vessel.
Granite, the true Material of the Coffer.

A the third column of our table on
reference to
page 100, will show that travellers have assigned the
no OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
coffer to almost every mineral, from black marble to red

granite, and porphyry of a colour wliicb no one has
ventured to name. The majority of modern authors
are in favour of red granite. I was for a long time
before going to Egypt inclined to porphyry, doubting
ifanything so well known and distinctly marked as red
granite would ever have been called black marble and ;
having been further at that period so distinctly assured

about the coffer by a railway engineer who had been
much in Egypt, that "it is undoubtedly porphyry :
an assertion which he backed up by describing some

of the differences in character between the material of
the coffer, as witnessed by himself, and the indubitable
red granite walls of the chamber.
This granite he traced to the quarries of Syene, 550
miles up the river from the Pyramid for nearer than
;
that, there is not a particle of granite rock on the banks

of the Nile, or within many days' journey from them on
either side but there, at the cataracts of the Nile above
:
Syene, it abounds and Syene was in fact a storehouse

;
of granite (of the syenitic variety, but still eminently to

be called granite rather than by any other mineral
name equally understood by the public at large) for
every dynasty that sat on the throne of Egypt subse-
quently to the building of the Great Pyramid.
Porphyry may not improbably be also found at Syene,
amongst the veins and extravasations of granite and
basaltwhich there abound but the most celebrated
:
Egyptian quarries of porphyry, both red and green,

were much nearer the Bed Sea than the Nile, or at
and about the Gebel Dokkan and Mount Porphorytes
therefore in much closer geographical proximity to, and,
perhaps, geological connection with, the granite moun-
tains of Sinai than the plutonic beds of Philse and
Syene.
Nevertheless, I having at last visited Egypt in 1864-5,
Chap. VII.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 1 1
after the publication of the first edition of this book,

spent almost whole days and weeks in this King's Chamber
of the Great Pyramid, until all sense of novelty and
needless mystery in small had worn away
things ;
and then decided, without the smallest hesitation, for

the material of the coffer being syenitic granite ; ex-
ceedingly like, but perhaps a little harder as well as
darker than, the constructive blocks of the walls of the
King's Chamber containing it.
Granite in the Dark, and Semi-darJc, Ages now gone by.
Modern measures of the coffer are still awaiting us

but first I will plead for a little more about granite,
so necessary is it one to know intimately
for every
both where that mineral is, and where it is not, in the
structure of the Great Pyramid besides also under-
:
standing what is implied mechanically, and also, if

possible, what was intended to be held symbolically,
whenever the primeval architect abandoned the use
of the limestone he had at hand, and adopted the
granite procured with utmost toil and expense from
a distance whether it came from Syene, as modern
;
Egyptologists usually determine, or from Sinai, as

Professor Greaves would rather infer.
Recent travellers have indeed abundantly detected the
cartouches or ovals of both King Cheops and King Che-
phren, or Shofo and Nou-Shofo, of the Jeezeh Pyramids,
on certain quarried rocks in the Sinaitic peninsula, near
Wadee Maghara but the " works " with which these
;
inscriptions were connected are generally supposed to

have been copper mines and emerald pits and the follow- ;
ing original note by Professor Greaves, evidently written

long before the day of mineralogy, may be useful for
a different purpose. The passage runs as follows :
" I conceive it " (the material of the coffer) " to be of

that sort of porphyry which Pliny calls leucostictos,
112 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt TT.
and describes thus :

— ' Eubet porjDhyrites in eadem
iEgypto, ex eo candidis intervenientibus punctis leu-
costictos appellatur. Quantislibet molibus csedendis
sufficiunt lapidicinse.' Of this kind of marble there
was, and
still are, an infinite quantity of columns in
Egypt. But Venetian, a man very curious, who ac-

companied me thither, imagined that this sort of
marble came from Mount Sinai, where he had lived
amongst the rocks, Avhich he affirmed to be speckled
with party colours of black and white and red, like
this ;and to confirm his assertion, he alleged that he
had seen a great column left imperfect amongst the
cliffs almost as big as that huge and admirable pillar
standing to the south of Alexandria. Which opinion of

his doth well corres23ond with the tradition of Aristides,
who reports that in Arabia there is a quarry of excellent
porphyry."
Sad confusion here between granite and porphyry
in the seventeenth century : while in the " unheroic
eighteenth century" Anglo-Saxon ignorance of granite
went on increasing. No fresh granite was then being
worked anywhere direct from nature, and the monuments
of antiquity composed of it Avere first suspected, and then
alleged, to be factitious as thus stated by a Mediter-
ranean traveller in 1702
;
—
"The column of Pompey
:
at Alexandria. Some think it of a kind of marble, but

others incline rather to believe that 'twas built of
melted stone cast moulds upon the place.
in The
latter opinion seems most probable, for there is not
tJie least piece of that stone to be found in any part of
the world, and the pillar is so prodigiously big and high

that it could' hardly be erected without a miracle. I
know 'tis alleged by those who believe the story of the
Ehodian colossus, that the ancients had the advantage
of admirable machines to raise such bulky pieces ; but
I should reckon myself extremely obliged to those gen-
Chap. YIL] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 1
1
tlemen if they would show me any probable reason why,

among so great a variety of Egyptian monuments of
antiquity, there is not one of marble; and by what
unaccountable accident the stone called granite, which
was then so common, is now grown so scarce that the
most curious inquiries into the works of natuje cannot
find the least fragment of it that was not employed in
ancient structures.
''And even though I should suppose, with my
adversaries, that the quarries out of which this stone
was dug were by degrees so entirely exhausted that
there is not the least footstep of 'em left, and that
Nature herself has lost so much of ancient vigour and
fecundity that she is not able to produce new ones, I
may still be allowed to ask why granite was only used
in obelisks or columns of a prodigious bigness for if :
it were really a sort of stone or marble, I see no reason
why we might not find small pieces of it, as well as of

"porphyry and other precious kinds of marble.
" These reflections, in my opinion, may serve to
confirm the hypothesis of those who believe that all

these admirable monuments were actually cast in a
mould and. if they would take the pains to view this
;
column attentively, they would soon be convinced by

the testimony of their own eyes that 'tis only a kind of
cement composed of sand and calcined stone, not unlike
to mortar or lime, which grows hard by degrees."
Another century of modern civilisation rolled on,
and then we find the celebrated traveller Dr. Clarke quite
convinced that granite is a natural substance, and that
hand specimens of it may be found by those who will
search from country to country through the world but ;
yet so seldom met with, that he has all this trouble in

explaining to London society seventy years ago what com-
mon rock material it is that he is talking about " By :
—
Greaves' Thebaick marble is to be understood that most
114 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part 11.
beautiful variety of granite called by Italian lapidaries

granito rosso (see 'Forbes Travels/ p. 226, London,
1776), which is composed essentially of feldspar, of
quartz, and of mica. It is often called Oriental granite,
and sometimes Egyptian granite ; but it differs in no
respect from European granite, except that feldspar
enters more largely as a constituent into the mass than
is usual with the granite of Europe. The author has
seen granite of the same kind, and of equal beauty, in
fragments, upon the shores of the Hebrides, particularly
at Icolmkill."
Sixty more years of modern civilisation passed away.
Macdonald at Aberdeen had by that time taught his
countrymen how to work in polished granite, both red
and grey, far and wide over Scotland. From tombstones
to brooches, and from banks and insurance-offices to
kettle-holders and ear-rings, cut granite (poured forth
since then without any stint both by the pale Queen of
the North and her blushing sister of Peterhead) is now
used on every side until all society, and the children
;
too, talk as glibly in these our days about the once

awfully mysterious tri-speckled stone, ''
as maids of
thirteen do of puppy-dogs." And yet the thing is not
plain to all our educated gentlemen even yet.
When, for instance, my wife and I were living
through several months in a tomb of the eastern cliff
of the Great Pyramid hill in 1865, a Cambridge man,
with a most respectable name in science, and a sage-
looking, experienced, head of iron-grey hair, called upon
us and remarked, to the lady too, who knows a great deal
more about minerals than I do, " What a fine granite
cavern you are living in." Granite, indeed poor man ! !
when the petrified nummulites were staring at him all

the time out of the naught but limestone on every side !
And other travellers within the last few years have con-
fidently talked of having seen granite in the entrance
Chap. YIL] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 1 1
passage of tlie Great Pyramid, granite in the subter-
ranean chamber, granite forming the casing-stone heaps

outside, granite, in fact, anywhere and everywhere,
and basalt dykes in the Pyramid hill too, though in a
country of pure nummulite limestone.
They, however, being free and independent writers,
cannot be easily interfered with but will my readers
;
at least excuse me for insisting upon it, that for any

would-be pyramidist scholar it is a most awful mistake
to say granite, when he means limestone, or vice versa
and to see limestone, where the primeval architect went
to infinite pains to place granite. To talk thus inter-
changeably of the two is, indeed, over and above saying
the thing that is not in mineralogy, over and above too
taking hard for soft, and soft for hard Neptunian for
;
plutonian ; repletion with traces of organic existence for

naught but crystals that never had a breath of life in
—
them, it is also on the part of such individual a
depriving himself of the only absolutely positive feature
that he can, or should, speak to in all pyramid inquiry
as thus :
Questions of angle, line, and measure of weight are

all questions of degree of approximation only or of ;
limits of approach to a something which may never be

actually touched, or even defined. But if nummulitic
limestone cannot be distinguished absolutely from red
granite, without our being told authoritatively, by uni-
versity scholars, that one of those substances glides so
insensibly into the other, that no man can say with
confidence where one begins and the other ends the—
age for interpreting the long-secret interior of the Great
Pyramid has not yet arrived.
But I will not consent to any such state of mind
afflicting the readers of this present edition of 1873 ;
and would rather, with them, as one amongst friends

and equals and often betters, request their attention
ii6 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt II.
(before returning again to the coffer in the King's

Chamber) to a prevailing feature of the manner in
which the Great Pyramid makes its chief use of this
rock, of so many colours and strange traditions, granite.
There is granite in the Great Pyramid, and granite
in various small pyramids yet so far from their being
;
therefore alike, it is on that very account, or by that

very means, that most difference may be detected both
in their designs and even in the very minds of their
designers.
Take the third pyramid as an example the world ;
hailed it as the " Coloured Pyramid;" coloured, forsooth,
because its casing-stones more than half-way uj) were of

red granite. That that little third pyramid was there-
fore more expensive than the Great one, all its friends
admit, and even boast of but what else did it gain
:
thereby ? Lasting power, is the general idea ; because

granite is so proverbially hard. But, alas ! granite,
besides being hard, is also sovery brittle on account
chiefly of its tri-crystallization, and so largely expansible
by heat, thatunder the influence of a hot sun by day and
cold sky by night, it loosens and crushes minutely the
materials of its own surface to little pieces, film by film, and
age after age — until now, after 3,000 years, those hard
pyramid are rounded
granitic casing-stones of the third
into pudding shapes, which can hardly indicate the
angle they were originally bevelled to, within a handful
of degrees. Yet the softer, and fair, white limestone
which was chosen for the casing-stones of the Great
Pyramid (a variety of limestone found in the Mokattam
hill on the east side of the Nile), and which was begun
to be exposed to the weather before the third pyramid
or its builders were born, has, joined to that softness,
so much tenacity, smallness of heat expansion, and
strong tendency to varnish itself with a brownish iron
oxide exudation, that it has in some instances pre-
Chap. VII.J THE OREA T PYRAMID. 1
1
served the original angle of the casing-stones within a

minute of a degree, and their original surface within
the hundredth of an inch.
But because the Great Pyramid architect found lime-
stone to answer his purpose for casing-stones, did he
therefore use it everywhere ? No, certainly not. He
knew it to be too soft to keep its size and figure in
places where men do tend to congregate and where
;
strains and wear and tear may accumulate, and have to

be strenuously resisted. In and towards the centre,
therefore, of the whole mass of the Great Pyramid,
where strains do increase and the treasure was sup-
posed to be kept, and where Caliph Al Mamouns in
one age, and middle-class passengers from steamers in
another, rush in to see what they can get, —
there its
architect began, and in a very special and marked
manner, to use granite in place of limestone. And in that
deep and solemn interior, where he did so use it, there was
no sun to shine and heat up by day, no sky to radiate
cold at night, as at the casing-stones of the third
pyramid but only darkness and a uniform temperature
;
from year to year, and century to century.

There was, therefore, no tendency in granite to sepa-
rate its component crystals there but very great neces-
;
sity for its hardness to resist the continual treading,

hammers and mischief-working by the countless visitors
of these latter days. For the granite portion of the Great
Pyramid (excepting only the portcullis blocks at the
lower end of the ascending passage) begins in the
first
so-called ante-chamber apartment, through which those

visitors must all pass, in order to reach that further and
final King's Chamber wherein the employment of granite
culminates and wherein is to be seen standing loose
:
and movable on the open, level, granite floor that

pyramid coffer, or long and high granite box, which is
still awaiting our further examination.
ii8 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
CHAPTER YIII.
WHY OF THAT SIZE?
we grant, temporarily, for argument's sake, that the

IF
long rectangular box, lidless chest, or open granite
coffer, in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid was
intended by the precise, measured, amount of its cubic
contents to typify, as Mr. Taylor has suggested, a grand
and universal standard of capacity measure — can any
reason in nature or science be shown, why it should
have been made of that particular size and no other ?
In a later age the designer of such a vessel would
have been hampered by custom or led by precedent ;
but in the primeval day of the foundation of the Great

Pyramid, who was there then to control its architect or ;
from whom could that truly original genius have copied

anything or what was there to prevent his making the
;
coffer of any size he pleased ?
Of Scientific References for Capacity Measure.

The affair of the wherefore of the coffer's precise size
isindeed a question of questions, for there is no ready
explanation lying on the surface and the subject,
;
viewed as one of capacity and weight measure, is capable

of such peculiar perfectionings and remarkable refine-
ments, that we may have to dig extremely deep before
discovering the real reason, if it is there.
Chap. VIIL] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 1
1
Not that modern nations have shown a very par-

ticular care for the teachings of science, or extensive
acquaintance "wdth nature either, in ordering for them-
selves the size of their several standards of capacity
measure, having generally left this one standard to
something like arbitrary fancy and seeming even still
;
to think the subject either a vulgar and publican

matter, or one ruled altogether by their own more
scientific proceedings in linear measure. Thus, the
late eminent Francis Baily, in his report on the
standard scale of Great Britain,* says, after a magnificent
introduction in favour of the importance of permanent
standard measures, " such measures are usually divided
into those of length, capacity, and weight ; but as the two
latter may in all cases be deduced from the former, it
;"
will be necessary to consider only measures of length
and measures of length are accordingly the only ones
which he cares to take notice of in that very large and
learned paper.
French Metrical Reference for Capacity Measure.
Not very dissimilarly too, did the French philo-

sophers act when establishing their metrical system
—
;
for having scorned in the cause and for the

after
sake of accuracy —
to adopt a short natural unit for
linear reference, such as the second's pendulum, lest
in applying it to long distances errors should creep
in by continued multiplication and having insisted
;
—
on taking there a long that is, an earth large
natural unit, and obtaining, what they required in
practice subsequently, by continued subdivision (in that
manner producing their metre out of the measured
meridional distance from pole to equator), they went
* "Royal Astronomical Society's Memoirs," vol. ix.

the very reverse way to work in obtaining their units

of capacity and weight.
To procure these upon parallels to their " linear
principles,they ought evidently for the one, to have
subdivided the capacity of the shell of the earth and ;
for the other, to have similarly divided the weight of

all the matter, whatever it is, that fills or occupies
that shell of the earth, and gives on the whole that
it
general mean specific gravity, which is better adapted

than anything else known to man to be his grand
cosmical unit for the physics of universal matter. But
they attempted neither the one nor the other.
They did not even employ their metre itself in the
large, in this part of their metrology, and necessarily
adopt thereby a good honest size for their capacity
—
and weight standards which they would then have
been less extravagantly multiplying, in the common
affairs of daily life but, as every one knows, they
;
took the 1-1 0th part of the metre, cubed, for the
capacity measure; and filled the 1-1 00th part of that
with water for their ridiculous little unit of weight
measure —
a something so small that a poor country-
man wishing to weigh his daily load therewith, can
hardly either see or feel it : while the learned doctors
themselves, in speaking of, and recommending, it as a
universal standard of weight to the practical world,
have to break through all their artificial scheme of
nomenclature and, while presenting their metre pure
;
and simple, are obliged to multiply their grairiTYie by

1,000 introducing it indeed into the units place, but
;
with the name of Hôgramme. Wherefore even now in

Italy the metrological combat is between the old Roman
foot and pound on one side, and on the other the
modern French metre and /aôgramme shortened how- ;
ever by the country-people into " metre " and " kilo,"
to the still more inextricable confusion of the proprie-
Chap. VIIL] THE GREA T PFRAMID, 1 2
ties of a too learned, as well as too narrow, attempt to

coin new names.
The French Academicians had, no doubt, a something
in their little mite of a "gramme" which could be
referred, through both the metre outrageously minified,
and %mter when in a curious condition very difficult to
hit upon and keep it to —
viz., its maximum density at
a little above freezing — to that one element and not

;
a very large one, in the size of the whole earth. But

if there was such extraordinary mental satisfaction
previously felt at the metre, a linear human measure,
being a neat commensurable fraction of a linear
length along a quadrant of the earth —
and poor
Englishmen have had this flaunted and flouted in their
faces for fifty years past, until at last it has been pro-
''"
posed to abolish the British hereditary measures in
favour of the new French inventions, because the
former are so utterly unscientific, and the latter so
perfectly replete with science —
why should there not
be mental satisfaction also, when a capacity measure in
some way gives us a neat commensurable fraction of
the capacity of the earth or at all events reminds us
;
of its shape and capacity-giving power and when a

:
weight measure gives us a similar proportion of what

is even more important in nature, and special to our
terrestrial globe ;viz. the weight, or what goes prac-
tically to make what is by persons in general called the

weight, of the earth as a planet in space ?
There may, indeed, be some remarkable difficulties

in the way of accomplishing this reference for not ;
only are the arrays of numbers appalling, but there

may be some logical doubt as to how to proceed in
comparing a weight on the surface, against the weight of
each equal portion of a sphere, whose own attraction it is
* President's opening address to the British Association, Newcastle,
1863.
whicli gives all the appearance of weight to anything

laid upon it. The affair is difficult, and perhaps of a
transcendental character : yet not more so than, accord-
ing to many eminent men, with able mathematicians
amongst their number, are various other scientific pro-
blems already accomplished in the service of modern
civilisation. In the meanwhile, too, the earth has a
weight, or mass and not only so, but it is precisely the
;
grand French metrical school of mathematical astro-

nomers, who care not a straw for the visible size of sun,
moon, or planets. They want only to know their mass as
a term in an equation; and then, having obtained that,
they proceed in all their admirable calculations where
- —
so few of us can hold pace with them — for the orbital
movements of those planetary bodies under the influence
of gravity, as though the mass were concentred, in the
case of each separate sphere, into an infinitely small point
at its centre. To them., the high-class French mathe-
maticians, in sad truth it is almost an impertinence to
be told by the telescope that the substance of a planet
is expanded into a globe of such or such a size in miles ;
or into one large and several small globes as attendant

satellites. These great men want only .to know the
weight of the matter contained in each system, simple
or compound, reduced to a point or points, together
with certain distances asunder, and then they will set
their equations in array, and compute you any length
of orbital consequences.
Why, then, did not those confessedly most acute
and extraordinarily able men, when preparing a com-
pletely new metrological system for France (and, as they
hoped, for the world through France), give us some
symbolization or expression in harmonious commen-
surabilities of 'that which is astronomically far more
important than a sphere's linear measure, and is already
a term in their immortal equations, viz. the weight or
mass of the earth as a whole ?
Chap. YIIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 123
Perhaps they did not think of it or if they did,

;
perhaps they could not devise any means of accom-

plishing it. Certainly they did not do it, nor has any
one else amongst men done so, throughout all the
historical period of scienceand the reign of the schools.
Is it worth while, then, to examine the Great
Pyramid of 4,040 years ago, to ascertain if a practical
solution was made and enshrined there in a material
or substance undoubtedly oere perennius, and older
than Abraham, though only recently brought to the
light of human life and thought ?
Not altogether fair, perhaps, to expect it but some- ;
how, from the unique and unprecedented character

amongst human works which the whole of this gigantic
mass of pure masonry of the Great Pyramid, unvitiated
by any idolatrous design, is taking, on being submitted
to the searching examination of the science learning of
modem times, we have begun to look for high things
from every part of it. At present, however, we have
merely to inquire why, for any reason whatever, was,
or may have been, that smooth-sided and rectangular
granite box, the coffer, made of the particular size,
exclusive of shape, which we now find it to be ?
John Taylor on the Origin of the Coffer's Capacity Size.
On opening Mr. Taylor's valuable work* with refer-

ence to this question, we may see that he had and —
quite characteristically of so invaluable an author '
expected that his reader would require some explanation

of this matter. But after perusal, I regret to say that
what he has written on the subject, being on the
furthest confines of his researches and discoveries into
the Pyramid mystery, has not, for me at least, his
usual powers of satisfying, if even he was content with
"The Great Pyramid," p. 195.

it himself. He shows, for instance, tliat the cube-root

of the contents of the coifer is equal, very nearly, to
the length of a certain ancient Egyptian double cubit
in wood, found accidentally some years since, on pulling
down an old temple at Karnak thence called the cubit
;
of Karnak ; and believed now

to have been one of
the veritable mason's measures by which the profane
buildings of that day were measured and set out.
Not, indeed, that Mr. Taylor would imply that that
rod was either the original standard, or the Govern-
ment copy thereof belonging to the Pharaoh of that day,
or indeed any standard at all or that a measure
:
exactly equal to it was first used in, and therefore

characteristically belonged to, the Pyramidically distant
and most idolatrous city of Karnak. But without, so
far as I can find, putting anything much more distinct
than the above into its place, as the reason why the
founders of the non-idolatrous Great Pyramid chose to
make their coffer of its actual size in cubic contents, he
goes off into a disquisition on its shape —
an interesting
disquisition also, but on a much less important question,
if the subject really be one of a cajpacity standard
and measure.
That the coffer should be oblong-rectangular in place
of siniply cubical, Mr. Taylor thinks a matter of sym-
metry and convenience; expressly saying at page 197
of his " Great Pyramid," —
" But why, it may be asked,
was not the coffer made at once in the shape of the
cube of the Karnak cubit ? From its obvious unfit-
ness, if it were of that shape and size, to serve as a
model measure. The framers of the standard would
naturally have regard to the portability and convenient
use of the wooden capacity measures which were to be
founded on that model and if men of the present day
;
would prefer the shape of a (rectangular) trough to

that of a cube of such inconvenient dimensions, we
Chap. YIIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 125
may give the founders of the Great Pyramid credit

for so much common sense as would lead them to
the same conclusion. To all the inhabitants of the
East the }ioi and in the
hath was a familiar object,
appropriation form to the purpose of a corn
of its
ineasure, we see how it happened that this vessel

received the name of caldarium, chaldron, or laver. It
was that which it had possessed from the earliest times,
» long probably before its employment as a corn-measure
had been thought of"
Joseph Jopling on the same.
Next chanced
after studying Mr. Taylor's account, I
to fall in with a recently published paper,* which pro-
mised great things, and began most admirably thus :
''
In what is called the King's Chamber of the Great
Pyramid of Egypt, there is a coffer of porphyry (granite
really) commonly supposed to have been the sarcophagus
of the royal builder. This coffer, however, does not
resemble an ordinary sarcophagus, and its form presents
numerous definite and peculiar proportions, so that it is
impossible to conceive the structure to be accidental.

Having found the proportions geometrically accurate,
•theauthor of this paper believes that this coffer is
a treasure- chest of science, and that its proportions
deserve careful observation and study."
Then followed a theory, based on " squares inscribed,
or to be inscribed, in the circles of the human eye," as
a nearly invariable natural reference of length in man,
from childhood to old age (conveniently small for a
popular unit, but very difiicult, and highly dangerous
to the subject either to take off with the points of a
pair of compasses, or to apply directly in practice)
and some very astonishing results were brought out,
^ By Joseph Jopling, architect, in the Leisure JEc-.trf 1863.
126 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt 11.
in the play of arithmetical numerations,by themselves.

But on adopting the given size of the unit, and the
number of them stated to exist in the length, breadth,
and depth of the coffer according to the geometrical
formula, and comparing them with actual coffer mea-
sures —the results were far wider than most of those
which we have already found it necessary to condemn,
as not representing observations of the fact. Mr.
Jopling's arithmetic is indeed and the
one thing,
coffer in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid
quite another.
Hehekyan Bey and M. Dufeu on the same.
After this, a more remarkable volume came up for

study; a book printed privately in 1863, by " Hekekyan
Bey, ,
C.E.,* of Constantinople, and formerly in the
Egyptian service." It is entitled, on the " Chronology
of the Siriadic Monuments," and contains a large plate
of the sectional interior of the Great Pyramid (not very
good), and an allusion to the coffer, under the name of
" The Kings Stone, deposited by the Arions in the
"f
sanctuary of the first Pyramid, as a record of their

standard mêtric system^ In so far as that the book
shows an Eastern mind breaking through the tyrannical
Western hypothesis of a burial sarcophagus and nothing
else, it is well but the method of deducing a value for
;
the profane Nile cubit out of certain arbitrary propor-

* The author enjoys the following favourable introduction in Mr.
F. Sopwith's " Notes on Egypt," 1857 "
:
— We
next called on Hekekyan
Bey, who occupies a spacious and handsome house in the same locality,
near the north-west corner of the Place Esbekeeh. Hekekyan Bey spent
some thirteen years in England in early life, and thus acquired a perfect
knowledge of the language and institutions of the country. I greatly
enjoyed his conversation, which embraced several subjects of national
interest, and his general opinions and sentiments appeared to be those of
an enlightened citizen of the world."
t Early writers were particular in notifying that the coffer was cut out
of a single block of stone but this present name is a more peculiar
;
designation of it, and may indicate a tradition of its having something of

a special hidden virtue, recalling the fabled "philosopher's sione."
Chap. VHI.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 1 27
tions of both the outsideand inside measures of the said

King's Stone, clumsy in a scientific point of view
is
overlaid with masonic mysteries and discloses no better

;
knowledge of the real dimensions of the coffer, than

those taken by Greaves 240 years ago measures thus:
rejDroduced in Egypt without any of those necessary

subsequent corrections for the length of their standard
scale, or investigations of Greaves' large errors in the
granite box's outside elements of size, which have led
long since to grave discussions at home. The author,
in fact, though living, and flourishing too, in a wealthy
social position in Cairo, with the Great Pyramid in
view from the top of his house, knew nothing of the
coffer by personal measure his acquaintance with it
;
was confined to the pages of an English book more

than two centuries old !
In the course of the present year (1873) the ideas of

Hekekyan Bey, in an extended shape, have been pub-
lished to the world, as perfectly new to it, by M. Dufeu,
member of the Egyptian Institute, and of the Society
of Historical Studies in Paris. This work is distin-
guished from its very title-page (where it speaks to
'*
the fonv Pyramids of Jeezeh ") by special ignorance of
pyramid and on page 231, where its author main-
facts;
tains the hollowbox of the coffer to be merely a form
given to the cubit of the Nilometer, he makes me a
partaker of Mr. Jopling's numbers, though I have
always eschewed them; quotes Professor Greaves as
though he were a very modern authority and finally ;
pretends to give a set of measures of his own. Pre-

tends, I say advisedly, for when he puts down every
element of the coffer's size to the ten-thousandth of an
inch, he cannot be excused either for making several
errors amounting to one and two whole inches * or, ;
* See Quarterly Journal of Science for October, 1873, pages 511 to

615.
mucli worse, for having failed to discover ruling and

original features of the vessel itself, of more importance
t han many inches, as will presently appear.
Tlfie Freemasons on the same.
Freemasonry also, notwithstanding its boastings of

secret wisdom fit to scale the skies, seems to lead no
nearer to a knowledge of the metrological objects and
ideas of the coffer, than anything connected with the
idolatrous religion of the ancient Egyptians ; and to
all that side of the world, there has ever been an
impenetrable darkness touching the real nature of the
ultimate purposes aimed at by the symbolical, and we
may almost say, professionally scientific, design of the
Great Pyramid.
Wrote a Grand Secretary of the Freemasons to me,
from Cornwall, after my return from Egypt in 1865,
''
I am going to publish a book of our masons' marks,
of all ages and countries and as we hear that you
;
have been taking some wonderful photographs of the

King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid by the mag-
nesium light, I write to know if any of these marks
appeared upon either the walls or the coffer?"
" Don't you know whether there are, or are not, any
there?" I ought to have asked, in the interest of all
the world outside the Lodges but in over-haste to give
;
satisfaction to my correspondent, if possible, I merely

inquired,
— "What are Freemasons' marks?"
He sent a number of them in a letter, adding that
they were unfailing proofs, wherever they were found,
of the ancient presence of the thrice-mysterious craft
and that Mr. Layard, having had his attention once duly
awakened to them, found them most numerously in the
Assyrian buildings excavated by him in Mesopotamia.
But I could only reply, that neither microscopic
Chap, vm.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 129
examination of the glass photographs, nor eye-examina-

tion of the walls of the King's Chamber at the Great
Pyramid, would show one of those particular marks.
The Freemasons had in so far, on their own showing-,
had no hand in raising that sacred and pure building,
whatever they had been doing in subsequent ages for
idolatrous Assyrian kings and their fish-gods or any
other.
Yet the photographs showed other marks on the
walls of the chamber clearly enough and amongst these
;
there was one group in particular that would appear most

conspicuously in every view of the coffer. The walls of
the King's Chamber which formed the background of
each coffer picture, being not only dark, and red, but
also far from the magnesium illuminating light, were
generally almost absolute black in the photographs
yet letters cut on these walls by hammer and chisel
developed whitish lines of abraded and powdered crystals,
which caught enough magnesium light to make them-
selves visible in the photographs and appear even
luminous and then too, they were seen mysteriously
;
floating in space beyond the coffer, when viewed in the

stereoscope. It was just the sort of effect that Free-
masons might perhaps have coveted for the glorifica-
tion of their marks, but it was all expended, in the
principal instance here, on the mere ordinary Saxon
letters, J. W., the initials of some recent visitor.
So there was a valuable fact ascertained by negation.

There are no Freemasons' marks in the very part of the
Great Pyramid where they might have been most
expected, had wandering mysticists been allowed any
hand in the work while, even if the trifling little marks
;
sent me by the Grand Secretary had been found there,

who could have guaranteed that they were not put in
long after the building of the monument, like those
letters J. W. ;by some cousins of that genius, or by
K
J. W. himself, or perhaps by a certain vulgar Russian-

German, near the beginning of the present century,
whose name I will not repeat, because he painted the
jaw-cracking word on those exquisite walls of polished
granite, in letters a foot high, with a tar-brush
Had the secrets, therefore, of the Great Pyramid been
inscribed in mere, little, cut-in writing on those chamber
walls by their ancient architect, — as inscription anti-
quaries so often lament was not done in the orthodox
Greek and Roman fashion, who would be able un-
doubtedly to distinguish the ages of each inscription
and, if the original inscription had not been perhaps in
subsequent ages altogether expunged, prove that it was
the original one that it was coeval with the building
; ;
and that it must be accepted eventually by all mankind,

even though its message entails consequences subverting
most of the critical philosophy, or philosophical and
historical criticism, of modern times?
The Ledge Anomaly of the Coffer,
The Pyramidist scholar, however, most fortunately, is

not called on to pin any faith on fleeting inscriptions
things which many a man. in any age may
trifling little
cut and many a man in any age may remove or per-
in,
vert, though none of them should be able either to build

up, or to throw down and carry away the Great Pyramid.
But when the same Pyramidist scholar advances from
grandest facts of masonry (mechanical, and of the
Pyramid, not the " Free " falsely so called) to this coffer
of the King's Chamber, a loose, almost portable vessel,
and necessarily small, some startling difficulties are
met with. And yet eventually he may find, thart; well
measured facts joined to advanced theoretical science
will enable him to prove satisfactorily to himself, in
spite of all obstacles, for what purpose the ancient
architect made that vessel, and for what he did not.
Chap. VIII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 131
How astounded, for instance, wasnot I, on first

visiting the coffer in January,
1865, to find that,
though sure enough, that remarkable vessel was still in
the King's Chamber —
that no art thieves (whether Earls
of Belmore or plebeian Belzonis) had carried it off to
sell to a distant museum
ledge for a lid, of,

—
yet there was actually a
cut out or into, the substance of the
top of the sides, of what had been styled proverbially
for ages the " lidless box, or open chest, of stone."
Compared with was nothing that the
this discovery, it
vessel was chipped and chipped again on every possible

edge that the south-eastern corner was broken away by
;
fresh hammer fractures to an extent of eight or ten inches

ffiore than it was in the days of Colonel Howard- Vyse.
But that ledge cut out, when was that introduced ?

In the first edition of this book, in 1864, I had
ventured to publish a plate of the coffer and strove, in
;
mere lithography, to make it look as neat, trim, and

symmetrical a long and, both originally and intention-
ally a lidless, box as it is represented in the first-class
line engravings on copper of the great French work on
Egypt which I copied and no critic or reviewer
;
breathed a suspicion of there being any error ilien.

But as soon as I had gone a pilgrim to the Great Pyra-
mid, I myself was the first to discover the consequences
of having once put full trust in the French Academy
I had told the world in 1864, on the credit of that
immortal Institute, that the coffer had no ledge for a
lid; but in 1867, I not only, as in duty bound, untold
that, upon my own observations at the place, but left no
sort of doubt by descriptions, measurements, drawings,
and photographs, that there was a ledge, and of such
and such a shape and size. And when I further found
that it had been marked on a small scale in Perring's
views of the Pyramids published in 1840, I announced
that also, — and ilnzn were the critics stern and unfor-
giving upon me for what they called " my " erroneous

figure of 1864 ; while they said not a word touching
the grander plate from which that figure was copied
with acknowledgment, or their own ignorance until
all
instructed by my second publication.

Yet it would form a very pretty piece of literary
disputation, to argue out the date of that ledge on the
coffer, from the earliest datum afforded by high modern
scientific authority for that is the Egypto-French Aca-
;
demy, of 1799, which represents no ledge as then exist-

ing :or again, to try to arrive at a numerical expression
of the limits of respect due to any dictum of the French
Academy in future, from the degree of divergence
between what they published as their own testimony
touching the appearance of the coffer at the beginning
of this century, and what we may assure ourselves it
must really have been then, from what we find it to be
now.
The French observed Depth and Height Anomaly also,

in the Coffer.
A thoroughgoing essayist would likewise append to

the above subject a collateral glance at M. Jomard and his
brother Academicians in Egypt, for having further made
both the inside depth and outside height of the coffer
some three inches too great although generally pro-
;
fessing to measure, and sometimes succeeding, to an

accuracy of a hundredth of an inch.
The testing of this " French depth " matter was one
of the first coffer measurings that I made, on seeing the
vessel in 1 8 6 5 and the rude answer came out instantly, in
;
whatever way the question was tried, " French Academy's

;"
measures of height and depth 3 inches too great
and when, after some weeks' further acquaintance with
the coffer, I took magnesium light and photographic
Chap.VIIL] the great pyramid. 1-33
apparatus into the darkness of the King's Chamber, my

measuring-rods (specially prepared for the purpose at the
advice of Mr. Joseph Sidebotham, of Manchester), were
photographed standing side by side with the coffer, and
showed some 3 inches less of height and depth than
the once supposed unquestionable measurement of the
savants of France, then the intellectual ruler of nations.
But might possibly the tops of the sides of the coffer
have been in a different state in 1799 to what they
are at present ? Could they have been then three
inches higher than their highest part is now ? and
could some one since then have feloniously cut off three
inches from the top of the coffer all round, and have
cut in the ledge for a lid at the same time ?
Perring's views show that the action must have taken
place, if at all, before 1837 and from 1799 to 1837
;
was not prolific in clever granite cutters anywhere,

least of all too in Egypt and even if such men could
;
have managed it outside the Pyramid with the- ad-

vantage there of plenty of time, air, space, and motion,
could they have accomplished it inside the King's
Chamber want of fresh air, and the
in darkness, heat,
banditti-like surveillance of an irrepressible rabble of
free and independent Pyramid Arabs ? .
Besides that, too, the limits of those 3 inches, or 2,

or 4, open up a differential impossibility in the Pyramid
itself. The doorway of the King's Chamber, 100 inches
thick in solid, polished, unyielding granite (ceiling, floor,
and walls), is only 42 inches high, and 41*3 broad.

The of its present height, and without
coffer, therefore,
any whatever on the top of it, being in that lidless

lid
state 41*27 inches high, can only just pass through,
with the fraction of an inch to spare. But if it were of
M. Jomard's, and the Academy's, and French Govern-
ment's published height, viz., —
^
4477 inches, just —

fancy Why, even if they were
! all to clap on together,
134 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part it.
on one and the same hawser, they could never pull the
grand old rigid monolithic granite coffer through a
solid granite doorway two and three-quarters inches less
in height I
Confession of Error in the First Edition of this BooJc,

and attempt to amend it.
But leaving the origin of such mistakes, and the dis-
inclination in public bodies to confess them
afterwards,
— to those so quaintly called by our early savants " the
curious," I will write down with all penitence that there
was serious coffer-error in my first edition of " Our In-
heritance;" and will endeavour to make up to all whom I
then unwittingly misled upon literary information alone,
by setting before my readers here what size, shape, and
condition I found the coffer in, in 1865, and how the
inquiry was conducted. The following is, therefore, an
extract from my book, " Life and Work at the Great
Pyramid," published in 1867, and now revised, in order
to introduce some later observations and corrections,
by Dr. Grant, and Mr. Waynman Dixon, C.E.
THIil COFFER, MEASUEED IN BRITISH INCHES.

March 20—23, 25, 1865.
This vessel, tlie sole contents of the King's Chamber, and termed,
according to various writers, stone box, granite chest, lidless vessel,
—
porphyry vase, black marble sarcophagus, and coffer, is composed, as to
its material, of a darkish variety of red, and possibly syenitic, granite.
And there is no difficulty in seeing this for although the ancient
;
polished sides have long since acquired a deep chocolate hue, there are
fiuch numerous chips effected on all the edges in recent years, that the
component crystals, quartz, mica, and felspar, may be seen even brilliantly.
The vessel is chipped around, or along, every line and edge of bottom,
sides, and top and at its south-east corner, the extra accumulation of
;
chippings extends to a breaking away of nearly half its height from the
top downwards. It is, moreover, tilted up at its south end, by a black
jasper pebble, about 1*5 inch high (such pebbles are found abundantly
on the desert hills outside and west of the Great Pyramid), recently
pushed in underneath the south-west comer. The vessel is therefore in
a state of strain, aggravated by the depth to which the vertical sides have
been broken down as above; and great care must be taken in outside
measures, not to be misled by the space between some parts of the
bottom and the floor.
As for the under surface of the bottom (speculated on by some persons
as containing a long inscription), I felt it, near the south end, with my
hand and tried to look under it also, when a piece of magnesium wire was
;
—
burning there, without being sensible of any approach to hieroglyphics
or engraving. But as to the inside, or upper surface of the bottom, and
also the vertical sides of the vessel, both inside and out,— all the ancient
surfaces there, are plainly enough polished smooth, and are without any
carving, inscription, design, or any intentional line or lines they are
;
also, all of them, simple, plain, and flat (sensibly to common observation) ;
excepting only the top margin, which is cut into in a manner implying
that a sarcophagus lid once fitted on, sliding into its place from the west,
and fixable by three steady pins, entering from the lid into holes on that
side.
The west side of the cofier is therefore lowered all over its top surface,
except at the north and south ends, by the amount of depth of such ledge
cut-out, or 1"72 inch; and the other, or east, north, and south sides are,
or should be, lowered to the same depth on their inner edges , and to a dis-
tance from inside to out, of 1*63 inch. But the fulness of this arrangement
cannot be seen now, because in some places, both ledge and top of sides
are broken away together and in others, though much of the inner
;
—
base line of the ledge remains, thanks to its protected position, the —
upper and true surface of the cofler's side has all been chipped away.
In fact, it is only over a short length near the north-east corner of the
cofier, that the chippers have left any portion of its original top edge.
And a cast of that corner recently taken by Mr. Waynman Dixon,
shows, as compared with my photograph (and also with the frontispiece
to Vol. I. of my " Life and Work"), that a further portion of the side's
top-surface, indeed an awfully large conchoidal-shaped slice, has disap-
peared since 1865.
The whole question, therefore, of the full depth of the coffer, rests on
one very small portion of the north-east wall, so to speak, of the coffer ;
a portion too which becomes smaller and smaller every year that we live.
Only at that north-east comer too, is there an opportunity of measuring
the vertical depth between the ancient top surface of a side, and the
bottom surface of the ledge ; and it was, by repeated measure, found by
me = from 1"68 to 1*70 and 1-76 say mean
; = 1*72 inch.
The sides of the ledge depression appeared to me to have been
vertical, or without any dovetailing : and the horizontal base breadth of
—
such cut-out, measuring from within, to, or towards, the "without" of
—
the coffer, and restoring the sides to their original completeness before
—
the chipping away of the edges, is,
On and
But this appearance of the coffer's ledge having been rectangular^ has
been, since my
visit, successfully shown by Dr. Grant and Mr. W.
Dixon to be a mistake. For although everywhere else all the over-
hangings of an acute ledge have been broken away to beyond the
vertical, yet there is a small part left near the north-east corner, which
speaks unmistakably to an acute-angled shape not so acute as that of :
the sarcophagus of the Second Pyramid, but decidedly and intentionally

on the acute side of rectangular.
Along the western side are three fixing-pin holes, 1-2 deep, and 0*84 in
diameter, save where they are broken larger, as is chiefly the case with
the middle and southern one. The three holes have their centres at the
following distances from the north end j viz., 16-0, 45*3, and 75*1
respectively.
It is inconceivable how the French Academicians could have pictured
the cofier, as they did, without representing anything of this ledge cut
out ; unless they looked upon it as a comparatively modem attempt to
convert the original pure coffer into a sarcophagus, and which they were
therefore boimd to overlook.
OUTSIDE OF coffer: its figure.

The planes forming the four external vertical sides of the coffer, which
have never yet been questioned by any other measurer, appeared to me to
be far from true excepting the east one, whose errors are under 0*02,
;
or perhaps O'Ol ; while the north, west, and south sides are so decidedly
concave as to have central depressions of 0'3 and 0'5 inches; or more
particularly
At North side, central hollow or depression of coffer's
side (measured from a horizontal straight-edge
touching the side at either end, and in a horizontal
plane), or the quantity of central depression^ near
bottom = 0*45
Central (?î?r^6«ow near middle of height . . = 0-20
„ top = 0-12
Mean = 0-26 in.
At West side, central depression^ near bottom = 0-35

„ „ „ middle = 015
» n n top = 010
Mean = 0-20 in.
At South side, central depression^ near bottom t= 0-28

„ „ „ middle = 0-18
» j> » top . = 0-10
Mean .. = 0-19 in.
Again, when the straight-edge is applied vertically to the sides,— east

Bide comes out true, but the others concave-
On North
or
On West
c^' ...... side,
side,
the maxima
d\ at South end
of such vertical depression
.
.
.
0-20
.
=
. =
and 0-28
O'OO
„ d\ at North end . . . . = 0*20
And on South side, d'y at different distances from East
to West = 0-08, 0-12, and 0'04 in.
Chap. VIII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. '37
EXTEENAL MEASURES OF THE COFFER.

The comers and edges of the coffer are so much chipped, that the steel
claws I had had prepared for the sliding-rods to adapt them from inside
to outside measures, were found not long enough to span these modern
fractures and reach the original polished surfaces. A method was therefore
adopted, of making up the sides of the coffer with straight-edges projecting
beyond it at either end; and then measuring between such straight-edges
LENGTH OF COFFER OUTSIDE, MEASURED WITH BAR 100 A.
On East side, near bottom

„ 10 inches under top
„ above top
On "West side, near bottom .
„ above top
„ near top
Mean length
HEIGHT OF COFFER, OUTSIDE.
Height of coffer outside, eliminating the stone under bottom, and the
sarcophagus ledge of 1-72 ; i.e. measuring from coffer-bottom to
extreme ancient top of sides, is
At North end, eastern part of it = 41-3

Same repeated . . . r= 41-3
At North end, north-eastern part
of it =. 41-22
At other parts no top left.
Mean height = 41-27 British inches.

41-23 Pyramid inches.
Correction in capacity computations

for a supposed hollow curvature of
under side of bottom agreeably
;
with three, out of the four, upright

sides; and also agreeably with the
construction of the under sides of
the casing-stones, which rest on
their circumferences, on account of
a slight hollowing away of their
central areas ; say •10
Concluded capacity-computation
height 41-17 British inches.
41-13 Pyramid inches.
SIDES, THICKNESS OP.
For this purpose two vertical straight-edges higher than the sides were
placed opposite each other, in contact with the inside and outside surfaces
of any flank of the coffer, and the distance across was measured over the top
edge of the coffer ; finding at successive parts of the coffer circumference,
bearing from centre
South-south-west thickness
The above measures were repeated on March. 28th, and proved sensibly
true for this method of measurement over the top edge of the coffer but
;
if calipered lower down, it is probable that a different thickness would

have been found there.
BOTTOM OF THE COFFER, THICKNESS OF.
By difference of heights of two straight-edges of equal length, applied,

—
one inside and one outside, the outside one being further propped up
—
where required by a third straight-edge, inserted under the bottom, there
was found
nd€
INSIDE BREADTH OF COFFER.

(By Slider 25, not requiring any correction.)
Distance between North

and South end, along the
East and West sides.
COFFER, FURTHER INSIDE MEASURES OF.

DIAGONALS.
Diagonals inside the north end from either low corner at bottom, up
;
to a measured height of 30'0 inches, i.e. the greatest height quite free
from fractures then;
From low North-east to 30- high North-west = 39-71 British inches,

and from low North- west to 30" high North-east = 39*70 „
Diagonals inside west side from either

; comer below, up to a height
of 30 inches measured at the sides
or from low South-west to 30* high North-west = 83*19 British inches,

and from low North-west to 30- high South-west = 83-13 „
CUBICAL DIAGONALS.
From low South-west to 30* high North-east = 87*13 British inches,

„ South-east „ North-west = 87*05 „
„ North-east „ South-west = 87*06 „
„ North-west „ South-east ) _
~ oh.yx "
temporarily supplied \
These cubical diagonals give sensibly less than the diagonals computed
from the lengths and breadths on account, apparently, of the extreme
;
points of the corners of the bottom not being perfectly worked out to the
exact intersections of the general planes of the entire sides. But they
seem abundantly sufficient to prove general rectangularity of figure, in
all the main part of the coffer's interior.
Tine, Sarcophagus Theory of the Coffer.
With all this additional information, then, touching

the actual size of the coffer, let us take up once. again
that vexed question of " why
and on our of that size ?"
so doing we must, of course, let the Egyptian sarco-
phagus theory be heard over again, especially when it
has something to say touching shape as well as size.
The inside dimensions of the coffer being by our
ovm measures (roughly) 6*5 feet long, 2-2 feet wide,
and almost 3 feet deep, are at least long enough and
broad enough for a coffin and if rather deeper than ;
convenient or necessary, I will not object to that, as

there is now proved to be a ledge cut into the top of
the vessel, and quite suitable for a lid. •
142 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part H.
As there is a ledge, an intention to put on a lid

may or must be but it is still to be proved
inferred ;
wbetber a was put on, especially for sarcophagus

lid ever
purposes because, first, with a sarcophagus lid of the
;
ordinary style and thickness fastened into that ledge,

the coffer could not have passed through the closely-
fitting doorway of the room; it would have been several
inches too high. Second, a sarcophagus lid fastened
into that ledge would have betokened the accomplish-
ment of the last rites to the dead; and they would have
included among all Eastern nations, but more especially
the profane Egyptians, the engraving the deceased's
name, titles, deeds, and history on the
coffer, both in-
side and out ; but there is nothing of the kind there

so the coffer remains still the smooth-sided, vacant, lid-
less chest of old Al Mamoun Arab tale ;
quite capable of
having been made at any time into a sarcophagus but ;
never so made or converted, whatever may have been

the reason why or wherefore.
Considering, however, the coffer's approximate shape,
size, and situation, I am quite ready to allow it to be
"a blind sarcophagus;" viz., a deceiving blind to the

eyes of the profane Egyptian workmen, as well as a
symbol sarcophagus to others, reminding them of death,
judgment, and eternity (as well taught by William
Simpson, artist) but without thereby interfering one
;
iota with its further more exact objects and intentions.

And what are they ?
Only look at some of them, as the vessel tells them
off itself in number and measure, and see features
thereby which cannot be accidental features which ;
have never been heard of in any other, or mere, sar-

cophagus and which no Egyptologist, not even Lepsius
;
himself, has ever made himself famous by publishing,

as his " law of Egyptian sarcophagus construction."
Taking the coffer measures, for instance, as of the
whole vessel before the ledge was cut out, from the
previous pages in pyramid inches then ;
Length. Breadth. Depth. Volume.

Coffer interior = 77-85X 2670 x 34-31 = 71,317*
Coffer exterior = 89-62 x 38-61 x 41-13 = 142,316'
that within the limits of accuracy of the modern
is,
measures, the volume of the exterioris double that of
the interior and the simplest even relation between

;
them is that of capacity.

Again, the mean thickness of the sides of the coffer
being assumed in pyramid inches 5*952, and of the
bottom 6 "8 6 6, we have (from a formula first prepared
by the ingenious Mr. Henry Perigal)
= 89-62 38-61 X 6-866 = 23,758-

= 2 (89-62 X 26-70) Xx 34-31 X 5952 = 47,508-
Coffer's bottom
Coffer's sides
71,266-
or again, we find a duplicity of the one quantity against

the other; and the only apparent simple relation between
the two, and of the sum of both, with the interior of
the vessel, is that of capacity.
If now we may justifiably say, that though the
then,
coffer is probably what John Taylor did not think it,
viz. a blind sarcophagus and a symbolical coffin, it is
also most positively what he did consider it (though by
means of mensuration proof which he never lived to
see) —
viz. a vessel at whose birth the requirements both
of, and for, capacity measure presided and governed :
— then in that case, what is its capacity?
What shall we consider the Capacity of the Coffer

proved to he ?
Now, for the coffer's length and breadth elements ;
we can quote plenty of measures, but depth is a weak

point ; because, as already explained, every particle of
the original top of the sides is cut or broken away, except

some little patches near the north-east corner. Those
were in place in 1865, but who will guarantee that they
are there still, when men will hammer that exquisite
gift inherited from primeval time, merely in the ignorant
notion of sending their friends at home a chip of
" Cheops' coffin " ! When the last of these small pieces
of the ancient top, which I mapped so carefully in " Life
and Work," has disappeared (and Mr. Waynman Dixon's
cast shows that some of them are already gone), then
comes the deluge among future coffer measures a ;
veritable chaos of uncertainty as to depth, in the midst

of which French academicians might put on their three
additional inches again, and upset all the geometrical
doublings and equalities which have just been obtained
by means of our having still a trace of the true height.
But at this point of the discussion there comes in a
strange use of the ledge cut out, though it has hitherto
been thought of only for a lid and nothing else.
No lid has ever been seen by any historical indi-
vidual, but every man of the present age may test the
truth of the following mechanical adaptation viz., the. ;
ledge, though acute-angled, is cut out of such a base-

breadth and depth that a frame made to fit it flush with
the ancient top of the sides would, when let down in
vertical plane,and diagonally inside the coffer, just
form the diagonal of said coffer's interior, and the frame's
height at that moment would exactly measure the
coffer's depth. Hence the breadth of the ledge, con-
tinued across the coffer from west to east, would,
continue to give us an outstanding test of the coffer's
original depth, long after young cadets going out to
India, and comfortable shopkeepers, on a " spree " from
Cairo, shall have knocked away every particle of the
original top of the sides.
In this case also, of course —just as it usually is in
Chap.VIII.] the great pyramid. 145
all matters of so-called exact measuring no two human —

measures ever agree exactly and all that finite man
;
can hope for is, to come within moderately close limits.

So then must it be with the coffer's cubic contents'.
Taking the ledge breadth (from my '* Antiquity of
Intellectual Man," p. 300) as 34 '282 Pyramid inches,
then the coffer's cubic contents in cubic Pyramid
inches :
(1) By interior length and breadth, and by depth from ledge-

breadth = 71,258-
(2) By interior of coffer, by all direct measures . . . = 71,317*
(3) By half the exterior volume directly measured . . .. = 71,160*
(4) By sum of bottom and sides directly measured . . . = 71,266*
Here then we have a vessel whose cubic contents are
not only something excessively near to 71,250* cubic
Pyramid inches, but it was pretty evidently intended to
be both of that quantity within some minute fraction,
and to carry a check and a witness thereto down through
all fair accidents, through all ages, to distant time. While
that precise quantity, and the care for that quantity,

are so impossible for the Egyptologists to explain on
any sarcophagus theory of their own, pure and simple
for it has never been suggested b}^ any one a 'priori, and
is not found in any other sarcophagus from one end of
—
Egypt to the other that we must now strive to ascertain,
on methods new to Eg}^ptolog}', what the Great Pyramid
itself may hava to add to this, its own preliminary
setting forth of " a symbolical sarcophagus, adapted to
something further and higher connected with capacity
measure."
CHAPTER IX.
DENSITY AND TEMPERATUEE.
THOUGH there be no inscriptions, yet is there much

teaching on the interior walls of the Great
Pyramid ; and as the coffer, when taken merely by
itself, has proved thus far, too hard a riddle for full
interpretation, let us try the teaching of the walls which
precede, as well as those which surround it.
Ante-chamber Symbolisms.
In order to enter the Great Pyramid's so-called

King's Chamber, we have to pass through the " ante-
chamber," very appropriately so called, because it is a
little room which must be passed through before the
King's Chamber can be entered or the coffer seen and ;
in passing through it the attentive eye may note many

more complicated forms there, than in* any other part
of the Great Pyramid. Amongst these notanda are
certain vertical lines above the southern or further
doorway.
Previous travellers have contradicted each other so
abundantly about the number of these lines, that I was
*
rather surprised to perceive them instantly to be not only
confined to the number four, but these distinct, regular,
parallel, extending the whole way evenly from door-top
to ceiling, and no less than 2*8 inches deep and 3 '8
Chap. IX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 147
inches broad each, with six-inch spaces between, and with

similar six-inch spaces also between the outer side of
each outermost line, and the bounding of the ante-
room wall on that side.
Hence the lines were subservient to the spaces, an<?
the whole arrangement appeared to me, not so much a
system of four lines, as an example of surface divided
vuXjO jive portions or spaces.
As the doorway is only 42 inches high, and the
dividing lines are drawn down to its (now broken) top, a
man of ordinary height standing in the ante-room and
looking southward (the direction he desires to go in
order to reach the King's Chamber), cannot fail to see
this space divided into five. And when he bows his
head low, as he must do to pass under the southern
doorway of 42 inches, he bends his head submissively
under that symbol of division into five, and should re-
member that five is the first and most characteristic of
the Pyramid numbers. (See Plate X.)
Travellers describe the Wall-courses of the King's

Chamber.
Not for nothing, therefore, was it, as the intelligent

traveller may readily believe, that the architect of the
Great Pyramid desired to impress that division into 5
upon his, the traveller s, mind, just the last thing before
he should bow down previous to passing through the
low, solid, doorway, 100 inches thick and 42 high and ;
after that, rising up in the midst of the King's Chamber

beyond, and seeing —what should he see ?
According to that usually most correct of travellers,
Professor Greaves, he says of the King's Chamber that
every one may see there " from the top of it descending
to the bottom, there are but six ranges of stone, all
which, being respectively sized to an equal height, very

gracefully in one and tlie same altitude run round the

room."
Well, tliat is not tlie accomplishment of a division
into five, so let us try an older traveller, Sandys, in
1610. Says he, "A right royal apartment, and so
large that eight floors it, eight roofs it ; eight stones
flagge the ends and sixteen the sides." Worse and
worse.
Says Dr. Pocock in 1743, "Six tiers of stones of
equal breadth compose the sides " which M. Fourmont,
;
on the part of Bourbon France, confirms in 1755 by

laying down that " the walls are composed of six equal
ranges." The still more famous traveller, Dr. Clarke,
makes Cambridge in 1801 support Oxford in 1639,
by particularising that " there are only six ranges of
stone from the floor to the roof ;
" while, finally, that
usually infallible author on Egypt, Mr. Lane, with his
relatives the Pooles, seem to set a seal for ever on the
mistake by declaring, " Number of courses in the walls
of the King's Chamber, six."

What could have blinded all these men, and sent
them following each other helpless down one and the
same too easy rut of simple, ridiculous, error ? Dr.
Richardson, in 1817, was more original, if error appa-
rently there must be for he chose a new and hitherto
;
untrod line of it for himself, sententiously writing of

the room, " Lined all round with broad flat stones,
smooth and highly polished, each stone ascending from
the floor to the ceiling." But having once begun this
new misdescription, he soon has followers and we find ;
Lord Lindsay, in 1838, writing, " A noble apartment,

cased with enormous slabs of granite 20 feet high " (or
more than the whole height of the room) and Sir ;
William R. Wilde and M. R. I. A., in 1837, equally

write down, as observed by themselves, "An oblong
apartment, the sides of which are formed of enormous
blocks of granite reaching from the floor to the

ceiling."
And yet, will it be credited, even by little children,
that the walls of this chamber are divided into five hori-
zontal courses, neither more nor less, almost four feet high
each and that these courses are most easy to count, as
;
they must have been undoubtedly most expensive for the

architect to construct, because each course runs round and
round the room at one and the same height in granite
blocks 47 inches high, difficult to get in large numbers
so massive and uniform in any quarry and every course
;
is the same height as every other, except the lowest,
which is less than the others by nearly 1-1 0th part, if

measured from the floor, but is the same height if
measured from the base of its own granite component
blocks, which descend in the wall to beneath the. floor's
level* (See Plate XL)
The Pyramid Number of Wall-courses, and of Stones

in them.
Neither was I the first person to find out that the

courses in the walls of the King's Chamber were five
only, for the same thing had been noted by Lord Egmont
in 1709, and Dr. Shaw in 1721, and perhaps by some
others earlier or later but no one previously to myself
;
had, so far as I am aware, either fought against odds

for the correctness of his observation, or connected the
number with both the teaching of the architect in the
jtnte-chamber, and the quinary character of the Pyramid's
first arithmetic.
Yet, quinary though it be for some purposes, it is
* Full particulars of my measures of this room in whole and part, and

partscompared against whole, are contained in my " Life and Work at
the Great Pyramid," vol. ii. but are too long to introduce here. I have
;
given there also the immediately succeeding measures of a young

engineer, sent, I suspect, by a rich man, to trip me up if he could, but
confirming my measures both of number und size of courses and room.
ISO OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
decimal for others, as shown here in almost juxta-

position ; by the tenth part, nearly, taken off the
first,
height of the lower course, by the manner of intro-

duction of the floor and then by the 10x10 number
;
of stones, exactly, of which the walls of this beautiful

chamber are apparently composed. This latter circum-
stance was only recently announced, though on my
publication of 1867, by Mr. Flinders Petrie and does ;
him all the more credit because, when I came to test

the statement, there was one joint line, by mistake, too
many in the middle course of the south wall in my
engraved plate of the chamber, though the printed
numbers were correct. Yet as the upper courses, though
given by me, are on Mr. Inglis' observations alone they —
should certainl}^ be repeated, now that an unexpected
importance has attached to them.
The King 8 Chamber and the Coffer are mutually Com-

TYiensurahle in Pyramid Numbers.
Bit the tenth part, nearly, taken off the visible height
of the lower granite course of the walls ; w^hat was that
for ? Its first effect was to make that course, within the
fraction of an inch, the same height as the coffer ; and
the second was, more exactly, to make the capacity, or
cubic contents of that lowest course of the room, so
decreased, equal to fifty times the cubic contents of the
coffer, already shown to be 71,250" cubic Pyramid
inches. Two separate sets of measured numbers in
Pyramid inches for the length, breadth, and height, of
that lowest course giving as follows, when divided by
the coffer's contents,
412-14 X 206-09 X 41-9 3,558,899-

= — 49-95
71,250 71,250
And
412 X 206 X 42 3,564,624-
= = 50-03
71,259- 71,250-
Hence, close as was the connection of the several

parts of the coffer by the tie of capacity, equally close
is the connection of the coffer with the adjusted course
of the granite room in which it stands, and by capaxiity
measure also. While, if the multiple before was two, and
is 50 now, is not 50 twice 25, or double the number of
inches in the cubit of the Great Pyramid, the significant
Commensurahilities between the King's Chamber and the

Structural Masonry Courses of the whole Pyramid.
Neither did the fives and the tens of this chamber, on

being examined, end here for having been greatly struck
;
outside the monument on contemplating the grandeur

of the horizontal courses of masonry of which the whole
Pyramid is built, I began next to study them by measure.
Not equal to each other are they in their successive
heights ; but, whatever height or thickness of stones any
one course is begun with, it is kept on at that thickness
through the Avhole Pyramid at that level
precisely, right
though too the area of the horizontal section there may
amount to many acres.
To secure this result, in fact just as with the equal
lieight of the granite courses in the King's Chamber
walls, but on a far larger scale, it was plain that —
immense arrangements must have been instituted with
the masons of many quarries and such arrangements ;
imply method, mind, and above all, intention. Where-

fore, having measured the thickness of every com-
ponent course of the Great Pyramid, one day in April,
1865, when ascending to the summit, and another day
in descending, I compared and confirmed those figures

with ray own photographs of the building placed under
a compound microscope and also with similar num-
;
bers obtained from still more careful measures by the

French Academicians in 1799 and 1800 and then
;
began to sum up the courses' successive thicknesses to

give the whole height of any particular number of
courses.
On reaching in this manner the 50th course, lo !
the total height of that stratum, or 1,690 inches, gave

the hypsometrical level of the floor of the King's
Chamber as well as it has yet been ascertained directly
by all the best authorities. So that the level of the
50 th course of the Pyramid, is the level also of that
granite, floor, whereon is resting the coffer, a vessel
with commensurable capacity proportions between its
inside and out, arid walls and floor, in a room with 5
courses, composed of 100 stones, and with a capacity
proportion of 50 to the 5 th of these courses.
The dullest person in existence could hardly but see
then, that the so-called, in the dark ages, King's Cham-
ber,should rather have been called the chamber of the
standard of 50. Can we also say of 50 Pyramid inches
employed in capacity measure ?
But what is a length of 50 Pyramid inches in
the eye of Nature, and how ought that length to be
employed for scientific and general capacity-measure
purposes ?
Fifty Pyramid inches fqrm the one ten-millionth of

the earth's axis of rotation ; or decidedly the proper
fraction to take for capacity measure, when we have
already chosen one ten-millionth of the semi-axis for
linear measure.The reason being, that in measuring
amongst the spheres of heaven, men mea-
distances, say
sure them from centre to centre, and therefore have
only to take account of the radii of each ; but in dealing
Chap. IX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 15^
with either their capacity or weight, we must .take each

sphere in its entirety, or from side to side, that is, by
its diameter rather than radius.
More Symbolical Hints from the Ante-chamber.
Such is the answer to the first part of the question

and a hint how to deal with the second part may be
gathered from some of the hitherto incomprehensible
things in the little ante-chamber to this our grander
chamber. Little is the ante-chamber, when it measures
only 65-2 inches in utmost breadth from east to west,
116'3 long from north to south, and 149 "4 high but ;
it has a sort of granite wainscot on either side of it,

full of detail and was to me so complicated and
;
troublesome a matter as to occupy three days in

measuring. (See Plate X.)
On is only 103'1 inches
the east side, this wainscot
high, and is flat on the top but on the west
and level ;
side it is 111 "8 inches, and has three semi-cylindrical

cross hollows of 9 inches radius, cut down into it, and
also back through its whole thickness of 80 to 117
inches to the wall. Each of those cylindrical hollows
stands over against a broad, shallow, flat groove 21*6
inches wide, running from bottom of the
top to
wainscot, with a pilaster-like separation between them ;
and this groove part of the arrangement is precisely

repeated on the east side, within its compass of height.
These three grand, flat, vertical grooves, then, on either
side of the narrow ante-chamber, have been pronounced
long since by Egj^ptologists to be a vertically sliding
portcullissystem for the defence of the door of the
King's Chamber. There are no blocks now to slide uj)
and down in these grooves, nor have such things ever
been seen there but the gentlemen point triumphantly
:
to a fourth groove, of a different order, existing to the

/S4 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
north of all the others, indeed near the north beginning

of the ante-chamber ; and with its portcullis block, they
say, still suspended, and ready for work.
The, Granite Leaf.
That alleged portcullis block, however, contains many

peculiaritieswhich modern Egyptologists have never
explained and as it was first carefully described by
;
Professor Greaves under the appellation of " the granite

leaf," we had better keep to that name.
Its groove, instead of being 21-6 inches broad, like the
others, is only 17'1 broad; and in place of being like
them cut down to, and even several inches into, the
floor, terminates 437 inches above that basal plane;
so that the block, or rather blocks — ^for it is in two
pieces, one above the other —
stand on solid stone, and
could not be immediately lowered to act as a portcullis
if any one desired. Nor would they make a good
portcullis if they were to be forcibly pushed, or chiselled
down in their vertical plane, seeing that there are
21 inches free lateral space between the leaf and the
north entering wall and doorway, where a man might
worm himself in, on that face of it; and 57" inches
above its utmost top, where several men might clamber
over and where I myself sat on a ladder, day after
;
day, with lamps and measuring-rods, but in respectful

silence and absolute solitude, thinking over what it
might mean.
The granite leaf is, therefore, even by the few data
already given, a something which needs a vast deal
more than a simple portcullis notion, to explain it.
And so do likewise the three broader empty grooves to
the south of it, remarkable with their semi-cylindrical
hollows on the west side of the chamber. But it is
not any, or every, other notion which will therefore be
found to apply.
Chap. IX.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 1 55
Thus a military knight and engineer-general had, in

1869, published in more than positive terms a most
questionable idea of the descending entrance-passage,
together with the ascending passage and Grand Gallery
of the Great Pyramid, being a pet plan of the ancient
King Cheops for easily visiting his King's Chamber
when in progress viz., by going down the first slope
;
in a truck, whose impetus should be so remarkably

economised by ropes and pulleys, as to draw him up
the second slope to twice the vertical height he came
down from ;and the gallant commander could scarcely
be restrained from giving orders to the commissioned
and non-commissioned officers on the Sinai survey to
go over from there and fit up, or rather, as he con-
sidered, restore, such a system of ropes and trucks
inside the Great Pyramid and what for ? Why, to
;
facilitate the legionary visits of modern travellers

the very men who day by and year after year,
day,
break both the coffer and anything and everything else
breakable with their needless and provoking hammers ;
and become more and more rampagious the larger

parties they are allowed to accumulate ''
cutting such
;
antics " there, " as make the angels weep."

In the course of last year, however, a civilian engineer,
Mr. John Dixon — ^having returned from Egypt, where,
with his brotherMr. Waynman Dixon as resident
engineer, he had been building a bridge over the Nile,
and successfully exploring at the Great Pyramid also
kindly contributed several Pyramid drawings to the
Graphic in London.
These drawings, or their descriptions, contained some
allusions both to the granite leaf and the three semi-
cylindrical hollows on the top of the wainscot of the
western side of the ante-chamber. This special infor-
mation, apparently quite new to the military man,
seemed to set his ambitious soul in a blaze, for he
immediately wrote off with enthusiasm to Mr. John

Dixon about the truck system; and called presently
with a model of it under his arm, asking "if he
(Mr. J. D.) did not think that all those ante-chamber
arrangements which he had pictured, were just intended
to carry out his, the general officer's, ideas of Cheops'
pet truck method of going without any exertion up
and down the Grand Gallery. Was not too (he asked
—
most triumphantly) was not the granite leaf fixed
across the ante-chamber for fastening the fixed ends
of the ropes to and were not those semi-cylindrical
;
hollows made on purpose to receive the pivots of the

big horizontal rollers round which the turns of the
running ropes must have passed ?
" No," said the civil engineer firmly, " certainly not
for your running ropes would fray themselves against

the lower corners of the granite leaf; the whole would
be a bad mechanical arrangement ; and then what
would you do with the other end of your rollers, when
there are no semi-cylindrical hollows to receive them
on the east side ?"
On hearing which last piece of absolute truth, the
military engineer fell backwards as though he had been
shot ;and was instantly rendered so utterly helpless,
that had he been at that moment on the long slope of
the Grand Gallery, or indeed of any of the inclined
passages of the Great Pyramid, he would — instead of
finding them, according to another of his theories,
representations of " the angle of rest" and "repose,"
he would, I say, have been involuntarily set sliding down
at such a continually accelerated rate, that he would
have gone, alas headlong to some awful degree of phy-
!
sical smash at the bottom, piteous to contemplate.

Others, however, passing and repassing frequently in
1865 through the ante-chamber, on seeing those three
grooves, have rather received the impression, in their
more quiet and studious minds, of the three dimensions

necessary to express capacity-contents — the three hol-
low curves reminding them of the curved shell of
too,
the earth's surface and the granite leaf with its double
;
block (implying double power to its specific gravity)

leading them also to think of the earth's interior, or
capacity, contents, which are, when taken in the whole,
of almost exactly double the mean density, or specific
gravity, of tliat granite.
Earth's Mean Density approximately indicated, hut

required more exactly.
Here then, from every side —from the coffer, the
King's Chamber, the Pyramid courses, and the ante-
—
chamber trappings of stone all the very, and most
scientific, and suitable, items necessary for preparing
earth reference capacity and weight measures were

gradually cropping up in 1865 A.D., before earnest and
attentive study of the actual Pyramid facts, to a quiet
onlooker, measuring-rod in hand. But no mere linear
measuring-rod can supply the further radical idea re-
quired for weight. The something else called for in
this instance, in order to be true to the grandeur of
the beginning made in the Pyramid system for length,
could be no other than the mean density of the whole
world, and this quantity is not yet by any means so
intimately understood by every one, that it would be
generally and instantly recognised the moment it should

haply be seen, under some symbolical figure or numerical
equivalent, in the Great Pyramid.
Although, too, the earth's mean density has been for
long a subject of permanent interest throughout other
most important and varied branches of natural philo-
sophy, besides astronomy, and not only in this country,
but the whole world over, yet it has been practically,
diligebtly, successfully, studied by hardly any other
nation than ourselves ; and what we have done in the

cause has been confined to very late times indeed.
The first special move, always excepting Sir Isaac
Newton's most sagacious guess in the absence of any
experiment,* seems to have been made by Dr. Maske-
lyne who wrote in 1772 as follows to the Royal Society
;
of London, in the course of a paper urging the propriety

of making experiments to measure the precise angle
through which a pendulum might be drawn out of the
vertical, by the attraction of a mountain mass.
''
It will be easily acknowledged," remarked he, " that
to find a sensible attraction of a hill from undoubted
experiment, would be a matter of no small curiosity ;
would greatly illustrate the theory of gravity, and would

make the universal gravitation of matter, as it were,
palpable to every person, and fit to convince those who
will yield their assent to nothing but downright experi-
ment. Nor would its use end here, for it would serve
mass of the earth,
to give us a better idea of the total
and the proportional density of the matter near the
surface, compared with the mean density of the whole
earth. The result of such an uncommon experiment
which I should hope would prove successful would —
doubtless do honour to the nation where it was made,
and the society which executed it."
Mountain Determinations of the Earth's Mean

Density.
The effect of this representation was, that the society
did undertake the experiment ; Mount Schihallion, in
* Sir Isaac's words are : —

" Unde cum terra communis suprema quasi
duple gravior sit quam aqua, et paulo inferius in fodinis quasi triple vel
quadruple aut etiam quintuple gravior reperiatur versimile est quod
;
cepia materise totius in terra quasi quintuple vel sextuple major sit quam
si teta ex aqua constaret." Arudely correct approach this to the density
of the whole earth, but by means of such a decided over-estimate of
the mean density of the average materials of "mines or quarries," that it
did not carry much conviction with it.
Chap. IX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 159
Perthshire, Scotland, was selected as the most appro-

priate site ; Dr. Maskelyne being appointed to make the
observations, and Dr. Hutton to calculate the results :
which were reported, in 1778, to be, that the mean

density of the whole earth was 1=: 4-5 that is, composed
;
of matter 4^ times heavier than water.

This result rather surprised most men at the time ;
for " common stone," of which they had usually con-

sidered the majority of the earth to consist, was known
to be only 2^ times the density of water.
They looked, therefore, into the composition of the
Schihallion mountain itself, which they had vaguely, as
a first approximation, considered to be of "common
stone ;" and Playfair, the Edinburgh Professor of
Natural Philosophy, and an immense friend of Hutton,
the fire geologist, discovered certain injections of dense
trap whence he determined the mean specific gravity of
;
the whole of the mountain's minerals to be from 2 '64

to 2-81. In proportions, too, which brought up the con-
cluded density of the whole earth, to be 4 "8 with some ;
suspicions that it might be still more.

In this surmise the computers were undoubtedly
right, for every determination that has been made since
then, by every method, has invariably given
and
greater results. The only experiment quite similar,
excepting some results of rather unmanageable extent
in India, connected with the Himalayas, was that
reported to the Royal Society of London in 1856, by
Colonel Sir Henry James, in charge of the Ordnance
Survey. He therein describing the observations made
by non-commissioned officers of the Royal Sappers and
Miners, with their zenith sector, on and against the hill
of Arthur's Seat, near Edinburgh which observations
;
yielded, when put through the necessary computations,

as they were most splendidly, by Captain Ross Clarke,
R.E., the number 5-316.
i6o OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
Another species of experiment, not far removed in

its nature from the above, was tried in 1826 by Mr.,
now Sir George B. Airy, Astronomer Koyal, Dr. Whe-
well, and the Kev. Richard Sheepshanks, by means of
pendulum observations, at the top and bottom of a
deep mine in Cornwall but the method failed.
; Subse-
quently, in 1855, the experiment was taken up again
by Sir G. B. Airy and his Greenwich assistants, in a
mine near Newcastle. They were reinforced by the then
new invention of sympathetic electric control between
clocks at the top and bottom of the mine, and had
much better, though still unexpectedly large, results
— the mean density of the earth coming out, 6-565.
Natural Philosophy and Closet Determination of the

Earth's Mean Density.
The subject being thus so excessively difficult to

obtain a close numerical result upon, even by the best
modern astronomy, good service was done to the world
in the course of the last century, when John
the Rev.
Mitchell proposed a different and a direct manner of
trying the same experiment, actually between the
several parts of one and the same piece of apparatus.
He died, indeed, before he himself could try his acute
suggestion but it was taken up after his death by the
;
celebrated Cavendish, and worked very successfully in

1798, with a final result of 5*450. I say successfully,
much unkind criticism which he underwent
in spite of
from those who were more mathematical and less
chemical than himself ; for he evidently made a great
stride towards the truth, improved the existing deter-
mination of his day to a large proportional quantity,
and no part of the increase which he gave it has had
since to be removed.
Nearly forty years after Cavendish's great work, his
Chap.TX.] the great pyramid. i6i
experiment was repeated by Professor Eeich, of Freyberg,

in Saxony, with a result of 5'44 and then came the ;
grander repetition by the late Francis Baily, representing

therein the Royal Astronomical Society of London, and,
in fact, the British Government and the British nation.
With exquisite care did that well- versed and metho-
dical observer proceed to his task and the attention of
;
every man of mathematical science in the country

was
directed towards his operations. Much, indeed, and
more than any one then thought, was depending on
his labours for without them the world's knowledge of
;
the mean density of the earth, even up to this present

time (1864), would not have been such as to warrant
any interpretation of the Great Pyramid standards of
weight and capacity.
The well-known mechanical skill of Thomas Bramah
was first employed in casting an immense cylinder of
lead, pure and dense and then in producing from it,
;
by the most exact turning in the lathe, two faultless

spheres, each 12-1026 inches in diameter, and 380-469
lbs. avoirdupois in weight.These were for the attracting
balls, to which Mr. Simms added, with all an optician's
skill, the smaller balls to be attracted, and the niceties
of the " torsion suspension," by which the smallest

attractive influence on them was to be made sensible.
This apparatus was erected by Mr. Baily in an
isolated room in the garden of his mansion in Tavistock
Place and observations were soon begun with even more
;
than official regularity.

But they did not prosper.
Week after week, and month after month, unceasing
measures were recorded but only to show that some
;
disturbing element was at work, overpowering the

attraction of the larger on the smaller balls.
What could it be ?
Professor Reich was applied to, and requested to state

M
1 62 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt II.
how he had contrived to get the much greater degree

of accordance with each other that his pubHshed obser-
vations showed.
"Ah !" he explained, " he had had to reject a large
number of measures for extravagant inconsistencies ; and
he would not have had any presentable results at all,
unless he had guarded against variations of tem^perature
by putting the whole apparatus into a cellar, and only
looking at it with a telescope through a small hole in
the door."
Then it was remembered that a very similar plan
had been adopted by Cavendish who had furthermore ;
left this note behind him for his successor s attention

" that even still, or after all the precautions which he
did minute variations and small exchanges of

take,
temperature between the large and small balls were the
chief obstacles to full accuracy."
Mr. Baily therefore adopted yet further means to
prevent sudden changes of temperature in his observing
room but as he could not prevent them absolutely, he
;
profited by the advice of Professor J. D. Forbes, of

Edinburgh, of placing gilded surfaces between the
balls ; for, though gravitation will pass through any-
thing whatever, radiant heat has extraordinary difficulty
in piercing a surface of polished gold.
Immediately that this plan was tried, the anomalies in
the measures almost vanished and then began the most
;
full and complete series of observations as to the effect of

gravitation attraction from one set of artificial globes to
another, that has ever been made upon the earth.
The full story of them, and all the particulars of
every numerical entry, and the whole of the steps of
calculation, are to be found in the memoirs of the Royal
Astronomical Society, and constitute one of the most
interesting volumes'"'''" of that important series besides ;
* The fourteenth, volume.

affording a determination of the mean density of the

earth, which will probably be looked on as standard for
fifty years from its day, and charged with a probable
error of only 0038.
TlfiG Prohahle Error Statements in Modern Scientific

Worh.
Now what does that statement of probable error

mean ?
It should mean, in the above instance, that the real

quantity in nature must infallibly be confined some-
where between the limits of 5-6788 and 5 '671 2. But,
in point of fact, unhappily, it does not mean anything
of the kind. It is in reality, nothing but a way that
the scientific men have got into, copied chiefly from the
German savants, of representing a something or other
of a very confined and partial character connected with
their observations. A something which they cannot
exactly describe and do not altogether understand,
though they perfectly appreciate that it makes the said
observations look a great deal better than they really
are.
Thus Baily's earth's mean density was announced as
, 6-675, probable error + 0-0038

The Ordnance Survey's Arthur's Seat experiment gave
the same earth's mean density as
5-316, probable error ±^ 0-054
And Sir George B. Airy's mine experiment declared,

still the same earth's same mean density, to be,
6-565, probable error ± 0-018

From which mutually conflicting data, it will be seen
that modern science, whatever it says about its extreme
accuracy to j^ or less, cannot really be certain in this
1
transcendentally difficult, but infinitely important, phy-

sical inquiry respecting the earth's mean density to
nearer than, about -|^th of the whole quantity ; and that
is actually five times the amount of error that was
recently (to the special scandal of the ladies and gentle-
men of the Social Science Association when last in
Edinburgh) afflicting all the modern world's knowledge
of the sun's mean distance from the earth.
If in that case, the old, old Pyramid sun-distance,
though it would have been kicked against and put
down with a high hand only fifteen years ago, has been
justified by the very latest determinations made in
astronomy, — so we may hope, nay, even expect, that
the Pyramid earth density will be likewise justified,
when modern science improves her processes in that
department also and shall attack once more the grand
;
subjective problem of the earth, on the same stupendous

scale as that on which she is now attacking the chief
objective one, at this moment, of all terrestrial science
*"
and all mankind.
Earth's Density Number in the Great Pyramid.
Now the Pyramid earth density comes out most

simply, on the showing of the parts of the Pyramid
from the cubic contents of the coffer in Pyramid
itself,
inches, divided by the 10 th part of 50 inches cubed.

Whence, trusting to my measures, it is 7^L250„ :
—
divided by 12,500 the quotient being 570
; a result ;
which modern science may confirm, but cannot over-

throw at present, if she ever will.
Of Temperature Corrections, and how effected.
Some further questions, however, this modern science

already asks of Pyramidists, in order to ascertain whether,
and how, certain precautions, which she thinks necessary

in all her own important work, were taken, and still
remain effective, in those primeval operations of the so
long sealed up interior of the Great Pyramid.
For instance, if the coffer has to be considered as to
its weight contents in water (and water filling is so fre-
quently an operation connecting capacity and weight

measures), strict attention is necessary to temperature,
an element usually supposed to be only amenable to
the thermometers of the last 200 years yet the ;
smallest errors on the score of uncertainties of tempera-

ture (and we may say almost the same for variations of
barometric pressure), in the ancient work, would have
introduced unnumbered perplexities.
These perplexities, nevertheless, are far from being
found in the Great Pyramid's Coffer. Not because
the Pyramid architect either had, or left behind, any
very superior mercurial thermometers but because he
;
employed a method overriding thermometers, and be-

ginning now to be found preferable even by the highest
science of our o^vn day, its multitudes of thermometers,
and barometers too, of every kind, notwithstanding.
Thus the latest conclusions of the best geodesists, in
conducting their modern standard-scale experiments, is
expressed in the maxim, " have as little to do with
variations of temperature as possible ;" for temperature
is an insidious influence whose actions and re-actions

men will hardly ever hear the last of, if once they let it
begin to move, vary, or be higher in one place than in
another, or at one time than another. We have seen
too, already, how this feature went close to the annihila-
tion of the Cavendish experiment and its repetitions ;
and that the only source of safety was, not any attempt
by power of fine thermometers to observe the tempera-
ture differences, and by the resources of modern mathe-
matics to compute the disturbing effect, and so eliminate
J 66 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
it ; but, to cut down the variations of temperature them-

selves.
Hence that retreating into cellars, and closing of
doors, and only looking in through small holes with
telescopes. Quite similarly too, in every astronomical
observatory, where uniformity of clock-rate is prized, it
has been the last, and practically the best, thing to that
—
end yet found out, that after the clockmaker has done
everything which his art can do, in decreasing the dis-
turbing effects which follow changes of temperature, by
applying a so-called, and in truth very considerably
effective, " temperature compensation pendulum,"
there is always a further improvement that can be
effected in the going of the clock, by superadding other
contrivances simply to lessen the amount of heat-
changes for such pendulum to try its compensating
powers upon.
Thus, at the great observatory of Pulkova, near St.
Petersburg, where they value an insight into small frac-
tions of a second perhaps more than anywhere else in the
wide world, the very able Russian astronomers erected
the chief clock of their establishment in the central hall
of that building because in that hall no window was
:
ever opened, and large masses of masonry on every side

greatly promoted an equality of temperature both by
day and by night. Thereby was their grand standard
clock notably strengthened, and enabled to keep a much
better rate than a similarly constructed clock (with a
so called by the clockmakers " temperature compensating
pendulum " of course) placed in one of the outer astrono-
mical observing-rooms ; and where the opening of the
shutters in the roof for star observation, necessarily
admitted air sometimes warm and sometimes cold.
But within the course of the year 1864, I was
informed by M. Wagner, then in charge of the time
observations at Pulkova under M. Otto Struve, that
their normal clock was then going more uniformly than

ithad ever done before, or than they believe any other
clock in the world is going and because, from their
;
central hall, windowless though it might be, on the

ground-floor of the building, they had recently removed
the clock to the "subterraneans" of the observatory,
where the natural changes of temperature are smaller
still.
It is not, however, quite certain yet, that theirs is the

best-going clock in existence, for M. Le Yerrier has
recently removed the normal clock of the Paris Observa-
tory to the " Caves," which exist there underground at
a depth of 95 feet below the surface and in a trium-
;
phant manner he remarked, when mentioning the case

to me, '' temperature invariable, constant'^
Now, at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, there
have been observations taken for many years of several
large and very long-stemmed thermometers, whose
bulbs have been let into the rock at various measured
depths and it is found that, notwithstanding the
;
possibly-disturbing effect of rain-water soaking down

through fissures, there is such an astonishing power in
a mass of stony matter to decrease temperature-variations,
that at the surface of the ground
The mean semi-annual variation of heat amounts to = 60° Fahr.

At three inches under the surface. . . . = 30"^ „
= 16^
At six feet
At twelve feet
....
At three feet under the surface
= 10°
= 5°
At twenty-four feet = 1°
At 95 feet, then, from the surface, in the case of the
Paris Observatory, how very slight and innocuous to the
most refined observation must be the variation of season-
temperature But how much more slightly affected
!
still, and how admirably suited to a scientific observing-
room, must not the King s Chamber in the Great Pyra-

mid be, seeing that it is shielded from the outside
1 68 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt II.
summer heat and winter cold, by a thickness of nowhere

less than 180 feet of solid masonry !
There is not, in truth, in any country of Europe,

there never has been erected, and it does not look much
as if there ever will be erected, by any nation under the
sun, a scientific observing-room for closet experiments
that can at all be compared in the very leading requisite
for such an institution, with the King's Chamber of the
Great Pyramid.
When Francis Baily closed those remarkable observa-
tions on the ''mean density of the earth," he
of his
predicted they were not likely to be repeated
that
until the slow progress of science in general, and an
improved knowledge of the theory of the " torsion
pendulum," in particular, should have given the men of
a future day some reasonable hope of securing, by re-
newed experiment, a sensibly more accurate result. But
had he been awâre of the unique temperature quali-
fications of that central chamber of the ancient Great
Pyramid, where too the mean density of the earth is
already represented and turned to account for man in
the size of the interior of the granite coffer as com-
—
pared with the cube of 50 inches,: would he not have
been off the very next week to repeat his experiments
there and to have seen with his own eyes, before he
:
died, that mysterious and primal-founded science temple

of the south ?
Absolute Temperature of the King's Chamber of the

Great Pyramid.
All the knowledge and advance, then, of the present

day, so far from improving on, or altering with ad-
vantage, cannot too much commend, copy, and adhere
to, the uniformity arrangements for rendering constant
the temperature of the Great Pyramid's coffer chamber.
But in that case, the responsibility now falls upon me

of showing a something else which it is also required in
practice to know, — viz. What is the absolute degree of
that so produced, steady, and constant, temperature in
the King's Chamber?
There, unfortunately, wemodernlack high-class
observations continued sufficiently long and under un-
exceptionable circumstances but so far as what have
;
been taken may be trusted, the best of them are found

to indicate a particular temperature degree which theory
assists in confirming, and which possesses otherwise
some singular recommendations. In the Pyramid, as
before observed, there is a grand tendency for numbers,
things, and principles going by "fives ;" and this seems

carried out even in its temperature, for it may be
described as a temperature of one-fifth ; that is, one-
fifth the distance between the freezing and boiling points
of water above the former.
Observed Temperatures at and near the Great Pyramid.

The first grounds for this belief are, that M. Jomard,
in the "Description de TEgypte," gives the observed tem-
perature of the King's Chamber part of the Pyramid as
22° Cent, zzr 71°6 Fahr. but this was unnaturally raised
;
by, first, the men with torches whom he

number of
had with him second, by the incredible number of large
;
bats which then made certain parts of the Pyramid their

home third, by the ventilating channels not being
;
open or known in his day and fourth, not improbably

;
by the artificial dryness of the interior for certain it is, :
that in the great Joseph Well in the citadel of Cairo, in

the same latitude, at the same height, but tuith watery
vapour (and perhaps in excess), the same M. Jomard
measured the temperature there, and found it 17° Cent,
to 18°Cent.z=62°6 Fahr. to 64°4 Fahr.
1 70 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
Hence 68° Fahr. would have been nearly a mean

between his two observations besides being a probably;
closer approach to the pure and undefiled original tem-

perature of the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid
under both ventilation, and the other intended normal
circumstances of its foundation. And 68° Fahr. is pre-
cisely a temperature of one-fifth.
There is more, too, in the temperature numbers
resulting for the Pyramid, than the mere accident of the
mean temperature of its particular parallel of latitude ;
for that quantity would in truth seem to be certainly

higher, if observed at, or in, the surface-ground,
especially the low valley ground
than this pyra- itself,
midal quantity of one-fifth. Not only for instance did

M. Jomard find it so, for he measured 25° Cent. 77° =
Fahr. for the lower part of the "well" of the Great
Pyramid, and also for- several of the tombs in the open
plain in the neighbourhood but my own observations
;
in 1864-5 on the temperature of wells in and about

the city of Cairo (in winter and spring, and at a depth
sufficient to give as near an annual average as pos-
sible) yielded on a mean of 12 of them 69*9 Fahr. A
quantity which is also the identical result for the
mean annual atmospheric temperature of the same city,
as obtained by the Austrian Meteorological Society

from five years of observation.
Hence if the Great Pyramid was devised originally to
stand in a temperature of one-fifth, it was necessary that it
should be mounted upon just such a hill as that whereon
it stands (and more particularly the King's Chamber
level of it), in a sensibly cooler stratum of the atmo-

sphere than that of the plains below ; reducing thereby
69^9 to 68^ Fahr.
Thirty-seven years too after M. Jomard had measured in
the King's Chamber the extra temperature of 71*6 Fahr.,
(i.e., extra according to this subsequent theory). Colonel
Howard Yyse cleared out the two ventilating channels ;
and reported, without having had any idea that the

temperature had been theoretically too high —
that in-
stantly, upon the channels being opened, the ventilation
re-established itself, and with a feeling to those in the
chamber of most agreeable coolness.
But no sooner had he left, than the Arabs stopped up
the ventilating channels again ; while steam-navigation
and the overland route poured in day after day, and
year after year continually increasing crowds of visitors
with their candles and torches and frantic, Eed Indian
savage acts into the King's Chamber's granite hall ; so
that in 1865 I found its temperature more deranged
than ever, or risen to no less than 75*2 Fahr. On
one occasion indeed, was so much as 75*7 imme-
it
diately after a large party,from some vulgar steamer,

had had their whirling dances over King Cheops' tomb-
stone and their ignorant cursing of his ancient name,
to the vocal music of passionate shouting and the pain-
ful thunder of the coffer being banged, to close upon
breaking, with a big stone swung by their Arab helps
while the temperature was only 74° at the same time in
the Queen's Chamber below, and 73° at the dry-well
mouth lower down still in the Pyramid. Numbers
which evidently indicate an abnormal temperature-
elevating force at that moment in the King's Chamber :
and no wonder at least to any one who should have

;
looked in upon some of those mad and multitudinous

scenes of lurid-lighted revelry, indulged in by many
smoking, tobacco-stinking gentlemen, a few ladies, and
imp-like Arabs of every degree, black, brown, and grey.
Lamentable scenes to be beheld in the present edu-
cated age of the world yet scenes which both disturbed
;
my quiet days of measuring, and photographing by

magnesium light, there, at intervals of about every
three or four hours and which the Consuls would
:
172 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IT.
give no assistance in endeavouring to keep down.

" Egypt," they said, " in the present day is every man's
land,and every one is his own master when he comes
out into the desert here. Pharaoh would be pulled
from his throne, if. he attempted to interfere."
Temjperatnre and Pressure Data for the Coffer s Weight

and Capacity Measure.
At the present moment, therefore, the coffer is no
more of its right, or original, temperature, than its right
and original size, when so much of it has been broken
bodily away by the hammering of the representative
men of modern society. But the barometric pressure
in the chamber happily defies such power of disturbance,
and keeps, by the law of the atmosphere over all that
region, expressively close to 30*000 Pyramid inches.
Wherefore we correct our temperature observations
slightly by theory, take the mean observed pressure,
and then have quite enough to justify us in this, our
first inquiry, for taking as the original coffer and King's
Chamber temperature of 4,040 years ago, and also what

their temperature would be again were the ventilating
channels re-opened, and a strict prohibition issued in
Scottish Covenanter phrase, against " promiscuous danc-
ing " by all whether educated or ignorant,
travellers,
over Cheops' mistaken gravestone, —
we have, I say,
and may quote, the number 68°0 Fahr. or the tempera-
;
ture of one-fifth.
Wherefore at that temperature, and the pressure pre-
viously mentioned, the coffer's 71,250 cubic Pyramid
inches of capacity, filled with pure water, form the
grand weight standard of the ancient Great Pyramid.
What weight in our reckoning of tons or pounds, that
will amount to, and what subdivisions of its grand
standard the Pyramid system permits, we may probably
take up with advantage

in the third division of our
book, — having devoted one more chapter to
after
examining our foundational Pyramid data of lengths
and angles more rigidly than ever and especially by
;
the method of comparing, through the agency of

several recent discoveries, the interior, against the ex-
terior, of this most remarkable, most abused, but already
most largely evident Monument of number, weight,
and measure, as well as of Bcyme funereal associations.
CHAPTER X.
CONFIEMATIONS.
tlie several theoretical conclusions arrived at tlius

IN
second division of our book, the interior
far in this
measures of the Great Pyramid finally made use of in
the research (as those for the size and shape of the
coffer) had been taken almost entirely by myself, and
generally with more care and at far greater length and
fulness of detail than to be found anywhere else. Now
w^hen some of those conclusions, ascertained long since
(i.e. five or six years ago), were quoted ve^y recently in
a London drawing-room as deserving attention, the
kindly speaker was confronted by a Cambridge mathe-
matician, who rose with authority amongst the guests,
and simply remarked, " So this man you tell us
of, made his own observations ! Then what can his
theoretical deductions be worth ?
" Wherefore the
previous speaker was instantly extinguished, or held to
be so, by every one present (forgetful that the argument
against John Taylor in his day was, that he never
observed at all, but only wôrked from, or upon, the
observations of others), and the Great Pyramid was that
evening, for the polite society of that drawing-room,
handed back to the Egyptologists as nothing but an
ordinary Egyptian tomb.
Whether so-called pure mathematicians of College
upbringing have reason to be suspicious of each other
Chap. X.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 175
in such a case, I know not but a very different rule of

;
conduct has been for long observed among astronomers.

Indeed, the efforts of such men as Francis Baily, Sir John
Herschel, Professor De Morgan, and many others of the
leading spirits of their time during the last forty years
have been largely directed to encourage, and almost oblige,
every astronomer in a public observatory to do some-
thing more than merely observe more too than com-
;
pute his own observations also for they taught that he

;
should further apply them to theory, or theor}^ to them ;
and discover, if he could, anything that they were

capable, in that combination, of disclosing.
No
doubt the observations should first, wherever pos-
be published pure and simple
sible, though that costs ;
money, which is not always forthcoming even in Govern-

ment establishments ; and afterwards, or separately,
should appear any theoretical discoveries that eitlter the
observer, or any one else may have been able to educe
out of them. But that was exactly what I had done
in the case of my Pyramid observations of 1865.
For, by immense sacrifices out of a small income on
the part of my wife and self, I had published the
original observations in 1867 in Vol. II. of my "Life
and Work," in as full detail as though it had been both
a Government expedition, and its printing paid for out
of the national purse. And this self-taxation was espe-
cially to satisfy all those intellectualists who might
wish to do the computing and theorizing for them-
selves while only in Vol. III. of " Life and Work,"
;
and subsequently in my ** Antiquity of Intellectual

Man," did I begin to try what I could make out of
this new and extended supply of raw material for
testing John Taylor's Pyramid theory.
And yet five years afterwards a stay-at-home mathe-
matician, without pretending that any better obser-
vations had been made by any one else, either before
176 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part li.
or since, could openly ridicule tlie possibility of there

being any value in my deductions, merely because I had
had the honour and expense, the toil and danger, of
making the observations as well
But fortunately, since the date of publication of my
volumes in 1867 and '68, several and independent free
spirits, often quite unknown to me, have discussed
some of the observations contained in them much more
minutely than I had done myself; and have made
discoveries which had never entered into my head even
to conceive of How happy then shall I not be now to
withdraw for a time into my shell as nothing but a mere
observer, and let all the theorizing be done by Mr. William
Petrie, late a Chemical Engineer Mr. St. John Vincent;
Day, Civil Engineer the Rev. Joseph T. Goodsir

;
Captain Tracey, R.A. Mr. James Simpson, Commercial

;
Bank ; Mr. W. Flinders Petrie (not yet entered into

the battle of Mr. Henry Mitchell, Hydrographer,
life) ;
U. S. Coast Survey the Rev. Alex. Mackay, LL.D.,

;
Edinburgh Charles Casey, Esq., of Carlow the Rev.

; ;
F. R. A. Glover, M.A., London, and, though last not

least. Professor Hamilton L. Smith (Professor of Astro-
nomy in Hobart College, Geneva, New York, U. S.) ;
the several parties being mentioned here according to

the dates of their researches becoming known to me.
The. New School of Pyramid Theorists in the King's

Chamber.
Of all Pyramid amenable to accu-

parts of the Great
rate linear measure, none presenting such
there are
advantages therefor as the King's Chamber because ;
it is —
1. Equable in temperature 2. Un visited by wind, ;
sand, or natural disturbances 3. Of simple rectangular

;
figure (excepting an infinitesimal angle of convergence,

Chap.X.] the great pyramid. 177
and a rather larger angle of inclination, observed as yet

only by myself and not altogether to my own satisfac-
tion) ; 4. Erected in polished, dense, hard, red granite ;
and, 5. It exhibits the longest lines of any part of

the Pyramid, both in that hard material, and in a
horizontal position with vertical end pieces.
M. Jomard speaks of his English predecessor,
Professor Greaves, having inscribed, or cut, the length
of his standard foot measure on the walls of that
chamber. But I could not find any trace of such a
thing and rather suspect that Jomard must have been
;
misled by some figurative expression of Greaves' s who ;
wisely considered, that a printed statement of the

measured length of that chamber (so constant in its
size from age to age), in terms of his foot measure,
would be a better record to posterity of what the
length of that standard must have been, than any
attempt to cut it there and then bodily into the hard
granite by smoky candle-light, with imperfect tools,
and while Mameluke Mohammedans were looking on
with impatience and hatred of everything done by the
Christian dog.
The Mensuration Data at the Disposal of the New

Theorists.
Certain it is that I could not find any corporeal record

of that foot measure in the King's Chamber nor can ;
the Heads Houses in Oxford find Greaves' s iron

of
measuring-rod itself, though they have the wooden
box for it safe enough. But the libraries of Europe
contain innumerable copies of the hooh record, to the
the length of the King's Chamber in the
effect that
Great Pyramid as measured by Greaves, amounted to
34-380 of his feet, i.e. 412-56 of his British inches,
in 1637.
N
Now this is a quantity well worthy of remembrance,

viz., this 412-56 inches of Greaves for :
By Col. Howard-Vyse, in 1837, that same chamber

length was stated to be 411-00
By Mr. Lane, in or near 1838 412-50
By Messrs. Alton and Inglis in 1865, from . 411-7 to 412*1
and by myself in 1865 it was given as follows, with

particular care to reduce my inches to standard British
Government inches :
South side, near floor level, 11th March, first

measure
Chap. X.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. »79
Diagonals of floor
From south-west to north-east corner 462-0
North-west to south-east . . . - 461-3
Mean measured floor diagonal .... 461-65 British inches.

461-19 Pyramid do.
Diagonals of east wall

Low north-east to high south-east corner . S09-2
Low south-east to high north-east corner,
subtracting 1-6 inches for hole in low
south-east comer = 310-0
= 309-6 British inches.

= 309-3 Pyramid do.
Diagonal of west wall
Low south-west, to high north-east, comer rr: 310-4
Subtract I'O for a sunken floor-stone south-west = 1-0
(The other diagonal not measurable on account
of a large and deep hole in floor in north-
west corner of chamber, whereby men enter-
ing have gone on excavating at some time to
under that part of the floor whereon the cofler
stands.)
309-4 British inches.
309-1 Pyramid do.
Mr. James Simpson^ s Sums of the Squares.
With these measures before him, and paying more

attention to those of them taken from rectangular sides
than the more difficult practical case of the corners,
Mr. James Simpson, adopting what he thought the most
probable numbers for length, breadth, and height, com-
puted the several diagonals, and prepared the following
theoretical measures of the room in Pyramid inches.
King's Chamber Lines.

i8o OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part II.
The differences between Mr. Simpson s adopted linear

numbers and my pure measures in the first division, it
will be seen amount to not more than '07 of an inch, or
within the error of an average single measure by me,
and much within those of some observers indicating ;
therefore that we may take his numbers as expressing

well the true dimensions of the apartment inUr se^
such as the breadth being exactly half of the length,
and the height exactly half of the floor diagonal (as
discovered also independently by Professor Hamilton L.
Smith) if indeed a good conclusive reason can be
;
shown for them and this is what Mr. Simpson does

;
most effectively in a series of commensurabilities of

squares in very Pyramid numbers.
Take, says he, half of the breadth, or 103 '05, as a
special unit of division ; and test and divide therewith
each of the above recorded quantities as below and
;
then, squaring the results, you will have for the
Breadth . . . 2 000 whose square = 4

Height . . . 2-236 „ =: 5
Length . . . 4-000 „ == 16
Or sum of squares for linear dimensions = 25 a Pyramid number.

. .
For the end diagonal 3-000 whose square = 9

.
Floor do. . . 4-472.

„ = 20
Side do. . . 4-582. „ = 21
Or sum of squares for part diagonals = 50 a Pyramid number.
. .
Solid diagonal = 5-000 whose square = 25 a Pyramid number.

. .
And the smn of the three Pyramid numbers = 100 .
And this is in the chamber whose walls, according to

Mr. Flinders Pe trie's recognition are composed of first,
just100 blocks of well-cut, squared, and even-heighted,

though very differently lengthed, granite.
The manner in which the long fractions of some of
the simple divisions clear themselves off, on taking the
squares, is especially to be noted ; and from a further

Chap.X.] the great pyramid. i8i
theoretical consideration of his own (which

I trust he
will soon be able Simpson
to publish), Mr. considers
that a more exact expression for the original size and
proportions of the room should be in Pyramid inches
Breadth = 206-0659
Height = 230-3886
Length = 412-1317
Diagonal of end = 309-0988
Do. floor = 460-7773
Do. side = 472-1562
Solid, or cubic diagonal = 615* 1646
And the grand division test of this chamber . = 103-0329
In so far, these very precise absolute quantities of
length are recorded here chiefly to gain their relative pro-
portions more exactly and, therefore, when we multiply
;
one of them, the chamber's length (its chief line and the
best measured line too of the whole Great Pyramid), by
the special Pyramid numbers 5X5, and find it to yield
10303"29, or the same row of ciphers with the decimal
point differently placed, as Mr. Simpson's touchstone
line of commensurability, we may then ask further
whether that larger, absolute quantity of length so
implied, has any particular value or meaning outside
that King's Cliamber wherein it is now found.
Then comes a remarkable answer for any philosophical
mathematician to ponder over, and especially as to how
it came there in the early age of the Pyramid's foun-
dation, before all history ; viz., that the area of the

square base of the Great Pyramid, whose perimeter has
already been determined by us to bear in those Pyramid
inches a round and even relation to the number of
days in a year, is equal to the area of a circle whose
diameter = 1030330 + -01 of the same Pyramid
inches. (See Plate III, Equality of Areas, No. 1.) Thus
bringing up again, though in a slightly different shape,
that squaring of the circle which was one of the chief

objects of the Great Pyramid's ulterior design touching
its external figure. And which object seems to have
been intimately and most intentionally wôven into the
very fibres of the Great Pyramid's constitution for there ;
was no automatic mechanical necessity obliging brute

masonry in the hands of unthinking workmen to give
the King's Chamber exactly that special size or shape,
which would endue it with a definite circle-squaring
commensurability to the size of the base of the whole
monument in which it is contained.
Linear Relations between the Coffer and the King's

Chamber.
But in the King's Chamber we may look to some

further values, bearing on interior subjects now and ;
that constant warning from the ante-chamber to expect

a " division into five " when we enter the King's Cham-
ber, at once helps us to a connection between its walls
(divided into 5 courses), and that peculiar vessel of
capacity formation and mensuration, the coffer. For
the 5th part of the breadth of the room, or 10th part of
the length, is 41 '21 Pyramid inches and the measured :
height of the coffer (the quantity where the hapless

French Academicians, in spite of all their high science,
made an error of three whole inches), is shown on page
138 to have been measured by me as 41*23 near its
edges but considered to require some small reduction
;
on account of concavity of the bottom surface, when

stating the mean height or for that purpose to be rather
;
held as 41*13, or somewhere between the two.

The cubic diagonal is, however, the most important
and governing line that can be drawn in any room, and
amounts in the King's Chamber to 515*1646 Pyramid
inches a quantity which, as Mr. James Simpson shows,
;
Chap. X.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. '
183
connects the King's Chamber at once, on one side with

itscontaining Pyramid, and on the other with its con-
tained coffer vessel. For, multiplied by 10, the cubic
diagonal is exactly the length of the side of a square
equal in area to a right vertical section of the Great
Pyramid (see Plate IV. Fig. 3) and on the other, the
;
same cubic diagonal divided by 2 equals practically the

sum of the lengths round the cofter's external base ;
or, in other words, the greatest radius of the King's

Chamber, 2 57 '5 8 Pyramid inches, equals the greatest
horizontal circumference of the coffer.''''
Capacity Relations between King's Chamber and Coffer.
Now the coffer, the moment we began to examine it

on its own actual measures, exhibited on page 143 a
marked tendency to duplication of intercommensurable
capacities and so also does the King's Chamber com-
;
mence with a duplex character in its linear measures,

seeing that the length is, with an accuracy of at least
a thousandth of the whole, just double the breadth the ;
breadth is double a certain unit, which performs wonders

in detecting commensurabilities and the floor diagonal
;
is double the height. That height, moreover, has another
double character, but in a different way for you may ;
measure it either from the floor as visible height, or

you may measure it from the bottom of the grand and
solid granite walls, under the floor, as virtual and
symbolic height, and find them then five inches higher
than before. This room has therefore, whether we like
it or not, yet by fact of masonry, tvjo heights ; and they
* This equation is not exact, owing chiefly to the stranpê anomaly in

the lower part of the west side of the coffer, shown at p. 137, and deserv-
ing further attention at the place. But meanwhile taking the breadth
just as given on p. 137= 3872 British inches, and the length, if freed from
the anomaly, =90-20 British inches; then (38-72 +
90-20) 2 X
257-84 =
British inches = 257-58 Pyramid inches.
1
84 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt II.
will be found on many an occasion to act as two remark-

ably powerful strings to its bow of symbology.
Thus, at once, if you take the first height, you get
Mr. Simpson's commensurabilities by squares ; the cubic
diagonal duplex relations ; and also the capacity commen-
surability by 50 of the lowest course of the room with
the coffer's interior. But if you take the second height,
what do you get ?
Why, with Mr. Simpson's last numbers, and a round

5 inches for the difference of the two heights, you
obtain 19,990,679 cubic Pyramid inches; or, as he
has reason to say (the preciseness of the five inches all
round the room having still to be measured, and quite
admitting of being, as estimated by me alone, and at
only one available place, some 0*1 of an inch too small),
" you may get absolutely and unquestionably twenty
million cubic Pyramid inches a grandly round number ;
in itself, yet having a duplex aspect in decimal arithmetic,

in common with several other features of this chamber
of twice 25, and its duplicating coffer." Whence the
chamber itself may be considered, not one long chamber
of twenty million inch capacity, but rather to be com-
posed of two chambers, each of them of ten million
cubic inches capacity, set together; and suggestive,
therefore, of the employment for capacity in that
united chamber with its coffer treasure, of a linear
standard consisting (as actually is the case there) of
two Pyramid cubits in length ; each of which cubits
is the ten-millionth part of the earth's semi-axis of
rotation.
This is, in fact, the very idea required to be given
by the Pyramid to clench the whole of our coffer capacity
measure theory in Chapter IX. It is well, therefore, to
know that there is still further confirmation to it from
both the Queen's Chamber and the ante-chamber.
Capacity References in the Queens Chamber.
If the King's Chamber be the chamber of the

standard of 50, or of two cubits length, the Queens
Chamber is the chamber of the standard of 25, or one
cubit length for it stands, with its original floor, not
;
the present one, on the 25 th course of masonry com-

posing the Pyramid ; and its one grand architectural
feature, the niche in the east wall, symbolises, by its
amount of excentric displacement in the room, a length

amounting to just one cubit. We might expect then
to find, if the theory be true, that one ten millions of
cubic inches are indicated by this room's contents, as
against the two ten millions of the King's Chamber.
And this does appear to be the case. (See Plate IX.)
The room is, indeed, quite a short one, and being
furnished with an angular ceiling,
is totally unlike the
King's Chamber in shape as well as material, which is

white limestone, now much encrusted with salt but ;
Mr. Simpson, extracting my measures of it from *' Life

and Work," soon perceived the breadth, measured by
me at 205 '6, to be a reminder at the least, if not
a repetition, of the King's Chamber breadth, 206 '06
Pyramid inches, but apparently clogged by the saline
incrustations. Wherefore altering the other measured
numbers similarly {i.e. making them about a quarter of
an inch, or nearly one eight-hundredth of the whole,
longer at each end), he obtained for the length 2 27 03
in place of 226 "5, and for the mean height 21386 in
place of 21 3*2 ; the three dimensions then giving for
the cubic contents of the chamber 10,004,676 cubic
Pyramid inches, or as close as could be expected nowa-
days from a chamber of soft material, liabiHty to saline
deposits, and of extra difficulty to measure exactly. A
chamber, however, which Professor Hamilton L. Smith,
of New York, keeping chiefly to the hardest and
1 86 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt IL
sharpest parts, has some splendid ideas and magnificent

researches upon (soon to appear in Sillimans Journal),
showing the niche more especially to be a very magazine
of the crucial angles of the Pyramid's structure and the ;
roughnesses of the floor (see Plate IX.), even to have a

symbolical meaning in connection with the incommen-
surables in nature.
The Ante-chamher's Symbolisms.
There was always, nevertheless, more satisfaction to

me as a measurer inside the Great Pyramid when dealing
with granite, rather than limestone and this harder
;
material began in the ante-chamber, the little dark

room almost in the centre of gravity of the whole mass
of this mountain of masonic skill.
Tlie total length of that ante-chamber was by several
measures, all recorded in "Life and Work," as follows : —
116-3
116-8
116-2
116-3
116-3
116-3
Mean = 11637 British inches.

= 116-26 Pyramid inches.
While the length of the granite portion alone of the

floor is recorded at
103-6
103-7
102-6
103-2
Mean = 103-28 British inches.

— 103-17 Pyramid inches.
and the height of the granite wainscot on the east side

of the chamber is given at 103 1 British, or 103'0
Pyramid, inches ; but considered to be intended to be
Chap. X.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 187
the same as the other really, and either of them to be

best represen tableby 103 08 Pyramid inches within
limits ± 05 inch.
On these numbers Captain Tracey, R.A. (now at
Gibraltar), was the first to remark, " Why, this granite
portion of the ante-chamber floor (thanks to those who
have been enabled to distinguish granite from lime-
stone, see Chapter YII. p. 1 1 1 to 1 1 7), is the length of the
unit test of the King's Chamber for discovering com-
mensurabilities, viz. 103-033 ; and the height of the
granite wainscot on the east side must be intended to
measure the same."
I Now, said he, one of these two equal lengths being
placed horizontal, and the other vertical (both of them
also coming to, and so enclosing, the same corner),
they evidently typify the adjacent sides of a square ;
the area too of that square. But the area of that

square of 103*033 in the side (or the length of the
granite portion of the floor only, far within the limits
of error of the modern measures) is precisely equal to
the area of a circle 116*26 in diameter; and 11626
Pyramid inches is the whole length of the ante-chamber's
floor, granite and limestone together. Or, as the Abb^
Moigno, in " Les Mondes " for 16 th October, more ele-
gantly puts it (having previously called 116*26 ^=. 2 7\
and 103*03 = c) this remarkable employment of
;
granite and limestone by the ancient Pyramid architect

is the method adopted by him of saying, in one com-
mon lanofuaofe of mathematical science, from an isolated

mountain peak of 4,000 years ago, to all nations in the
present educated age of the world, that
1. TT r" zzz c .
TTAo, after this first coincidence of the ante-chamber,

says the Abb^, could pretend that the diversity of the
materials and their relations, or differences, of length
are a simple, brute accident ? But here are others not

less extraordinary connected with their absolute lengths,
when measured in the standards and units of the Great
Pyramid's scientific theory and in no others known. :
2. 116-26 X TT =
365-24, the number of days in a
year ; the number, also, of Pyramid cubits contained in
the length of a side of the base of the Great Pyramid.
3. 116-26x7rx5x5(5is one of the chief Pyramid
numbers) =9131 Pyramid inches; the length of a
side of the square base of the Great Pyramid deduced
from all the measures that have been taken since the
happy discovery of the corner sockets by the French
Academicians under Napoleon Bonaparte.
4. 116-26x50 (50 is the number of horizontal courses
.
of masonry between the level of the ante-chamber and

the base of the whole Pyramid) 5813 P^âmid =
inches the ancient vertical height of the Great Pyramid
;
deduced from a mean of all the measures. And,

finally,
5. 103-033x50 = 5151-65 Pyramid inches ; oris

the side of a square of equal area, 1st, to a triangle of
the shape and size of the Great Pyramid's vertical
meridian section 2nd, to a circle having the height
;
of the Pyramid for a diameter.
Geometrical Derivation of the Passage Angle.
That same square, of 5151-65 Pyramid inches in

the side, is a still further important feature in the
design Pyramid for, as may be seen
of the Great ;
more easily than described, from the practical geometry

of Plate YII., by placing that square centrically and
symmetrically on the centre of the base of the Pyramid,
tri-secting its upper semi-diameter, and bi-secting its
lower, we obtain the positions of its several chambers
and passages and, above all, by a further reference to
;
Chap.X.] the great pyramid. i8q
the height of the building, we procure the angle of slope

of those passages.
This angle should be, from the construction, 26° 18'
10" : and my observations found it for the entrance
passage, by a multitude of measures with several dif-
ferent instruments, acting on different principles
26"
26=
26'
us conclude this one with reference to a very small

matter in size, though great in importance, viz. the
granite leaf, standing at the head of, above, and beyond
all these passages.
Some objectors to the Pyramid theory have
scientific
said, " We do not admit the your Pyramid
reality of
inches with its original builders, when you can only get
such inches by subdividing immense lengths of the
building by divisors of your own choosing. (Though
this is denied.) But show us a single such inch, and
then we may believe."
Whereupon Captain Tracey has pointed out that such
single inch is actually marked, and in a Pyramid man-
ner on, or rather by means of, the above granite leaf in
the ante-chamber and it comes about thus
; :
In that small apartment its grand symbol on the

south wall is the already mentioned illustration of a
division into five and if the symbol had virtue enough
:
to extend into and dominate some features in the next,

or King's Chamber (as in illustrating its now undoubted
number of jive wall courses), why should it not typify
something in its own chamber as well ? But what is
there, in the ante-chamber, divided into .five !
" The
sacred, Great Pyramid's own, cubit," answers
or the
Captain Tracey " for here it is so divided in the
;
shape of this hoss on the granite leaf, just five inches

broad. And further, that fifth part of that cubit of the
Great Pyramid's symbolical design is divided before our
eyes into five again for the thickness of this remarkable
;
boss is l-5th of its breadth. So there you have the

division of the sacred cubit into 5x5 inches."
This boss on the granite leaf (see Plate X.) is another
of my rediscoverings of things which are to be seen ; for
they have been marked, but not sufficiently noted or
measured, in that excellent though so unwieldy and
seldom consulted folio of enormous plates, " Perring's,"
Chap. X.] THE GREA T PYRA MID. 1 9
or rather perhaps to be called " Vyse and Perring's,"

views of the Pyramids, published in 1840.
Nor was this most unique yet modest boss described
and pictured by me with full correctness even in " Life
and Work," I having made it much too high, too
accurately rectangular at its lowest corner line, and too
sharply and neatly defined all round as I am enabled
:
now to say positively, having been kindly furnished by

my friend Mr. Waynman Dixon with a cast of it in
Portland cement taken by him in the Great Pyramid
last year (1872). The one inch thickness however, and
jive inches breadth, being fairly measurable along the
best part of the cast-boss for measuring, viz. its steep,
though not absolutely rectangular, lower edge, they
remain untouched and perfectly suitable for Captain
Tracey's analogy, which is further supported as follows :
—The boss, a flat one inch thick or high

bas-relief
from the stone, is on the north side of the upper
of the two granite stones forming that "granite leaf"
which crosses the ante-chamber near its northern end.
(Compare Chapter IX., pages 154 to 157.) Excepting
the presently broken state of the upper surface of
the top stone, evidently a modern mischief, the forma-
tion of the whole leaf is regular, rectangular, and sym-
metrical. Why then is the boss not in the middle
between the two sides of the very narrow apartment ?
(41 "21 inches broad).
My measures of 1865, if they can be trusted here,
show that the boss is just one inch away on one side
of the centre and ; has been otherwise shown by
as it
the niche of the Queen's Chamber, that it was a Great
Pyramid method to indicate a small quantity (there a

whole cubit) by an excentricity to that amount in some
far grander architectural feature, we cannot but accept
an additional Pyramid
this excentricity of the boss as
memorial of the very thing which is being called for
1 92 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IL
by the sceptical just now viz. one single, little inch

;
memorialized by the builders of the most colossal piece

of architecture in the world. All the more decidedly
too, when, as Mr. St. John Vincent Day has since then
shown, that that very excentric position of the boss has
enabled the distance from its centre to the eastern end
of the leaf itself in its well-cut groove in the granite
wainscot to be, within the limits of mensuration errors,
just a whole Pyramid cubit 25 '025 British inches, or=
something very near to it indeed.'''^ So that we have
tied up here the whole cubit, its fifth part and its
twenty-fifth part which, though so small, like the
;
needle in a haystack, yet is it also securely tied up here,

for the instruction of all posterity.
And Captain Tracey again shows that the lower stone
of the granite leaf (in this ante-chamber, which proves
be a veritable synopsis or microcosm, of the whole
itself to
Great Pyramid), that this lower stone, I say, which is fairly
dressed, rectangular, "j* and the one on which the upper
* My measures say, p. 100, vol. ii. of " Life and Work "
British inches '
Centre of boss to east side of room =

21-5
P. 98, vol. ii., depth of groove in that wall . . . .= 40
Whole distance from centre of boss to east end of granite leaf
in its groove = 2o-5
But again, on p. 93, and also p. 95, the grooved breadth of the
room is given in British inches at 48*1
48-0
48-1
Mean = 48-067
Half = 24-034
Add 1 inch of excentricity of the boss from east wall . -\- 1
Whole distance of centre of boss from the inside of its flat

groove in granite (a distance which I recommend to future
explorers to check for me) = 25-034
t My ante-chamber measures, as condensed on p. 37 of the 13th vol. of

the **
Edinburgh Astronomical Obs. " :
Say, granite leaf, thickness north to south, on east side . = 15*4

„ ,, west side . = 16-0
stone with its divisions of the cubit rests, — expresses a

notable division of the capacity measure of the coffer.
For it presents us, within the walls of the ante-chamber,
with a fourth part of that coffer vessel or with the ;
veritable ' corn quarter " of old, and which is still the
British quarter corn-measure both by name and fact and
practical size.
A Representative Antagonist of the Modern Scientific

Theory of the Great Pyramid.
•
But now, after so many and

confirmations, both large
small, furnished by the Great Pyramid itself (and there
are more still, and of a higher class, to appear in our
fourth and fifth parts), the reader may possibly be in-
clined to ask, " Who are the parties who still refuse to
allow the force of any of these things and persist in
;
saying that they see in the Great Pyramid merely

a burial monument of those idolatrous Egyptians, who
delighted in nothing so much as grovelling worship,
and architectural memorialization, of bulls and goats,
cats, crocodiles, beetles, and almost every bestial thing ?"
One of these unhappy recusants has lately offered him-
self for description. He is an Oxford man and a clergy-
man, a country vicar and a chaplain to Royalty the ;
author too of a large octavo of travel in Egypt, pub-

lished two years ago and already in a second edition ;
a book written throughout cleverly, fluently, scholarly,

but in an outrageously rationalistic vein of ultra Broad
Churchism, even to the extent of holding the. Biblical
history of man, inall its miraculous features and limits
Height of lower stone 27'o to 28-0

Breadth east to west, between the open walls . . . = 41*21 + a?
„ between the leaf's grooves . . =48'05 ±*

But they ought now to be repeated by some one else, when so much
theoretical importance seems to attach to them.
O
194 ^^^ INHERITANCE IN [Part IT.
of chronology, to be utterly false. The religions of Christ

and Moses this author perversely maintains to have
been in no way differently originated from those of
Egypt, Greece, and Rome. They were each and all, with
him, merely the product, "the summa philosojjhia/'
of the wisest men of their time, acting by their human
wisdom alone, and composing systems of religion suitable
for their own respective ages as, too, he would have
:
the ablest men amongst us try to do again for these

troubled and most unhinged times in which we live ;
times wanting, he says, a new religion, for that of Christ

is no longer effective.
This, then, was the author who, starting for his

Egyptian tour at six hours' notice only, tells us that he
took no scientific instruments with him and says,
;
moreover, that he did not want them, as he has methods

of philosophical observation overriding all science.
Thus, as to the almost endless series of mathe-

matical and physical problems contained in the Great
Pyramid, this vicar-Oxonian merely leant against the
monument, with his hands in his pockets, and look-
ing upward along its sides, declared that he got a
far better notion of it, than if he had made any
number of scientific observations for he perceived
;
with the greatest certainty then, there, and at once,

that in place of there being any truth in all the unique
numbers and mysteriously deep scientific things pub-
lished about it by the Scottish Astronomer Royal,
the whole edifice throughout all its building was nothing
but an ordinary development of ordinary human nature
in history. The Egyptians, he says, built the Great
Pyramid at the time, and in the manner, they did,
merely because they could not help it it was the only
:
way that occurred to them to build it, and there was no

thinking spent upon it.
If opposite extremes ever meet, they certainly do so
Chap. X.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 1 95
here : for the said Scottish Astronomer Rojâl also holds,

that the EgyptiaTis spent no thought upon the design
of the Great Pyramid, and built it without understand-
ing and because they could not do otherwise at that
it,
time. But that nevertheless a Mighty Intelligence did

both think out the plans for it, and compel unwilling
and ignorant idolaters, in a primal age of the world,
to work mightily both for the future glory of the one,
true God of Revelation, and to establish lasting pro-
phetic testimony touching a further development, still
to take place, of the absolutely Divine Christian Dis-

pensation.
The Astronomer, however, asks no one to take his
mere opinion. If the facts which he has to unfold,
work no conviction neither will, nor should, all the
;
words of persuasion that he could possibly utter.

PART III.
NATIONAL WEIGHTS AND MEASURES.

" LET ALL THE NATIONS BE GATHERED TOGETHEK, AND LET THE PEOPLE
B8 assembled: who among them can DECLARE THIS, AND SHEW US
FORMER THINGS ? LET THEM BRING FORTH THEIR WITNESSES, THAT THET
MAY BK JUSTIFIED OR LET THEM HEAR, AND SAY, IT IS TRUTH."
:
ISAIAH XLIII. 9.
CHAPTER XL
BRITISH METROLOGY, PAST AND PRESENT.
TTTHEN
' *
Magna Charta ruled the British land, —
and
perhaps in thoroughness of and completeness
spirit
of intention with those immediately concerned that was
not very long, —
a ray of metrological wisdom and a
beam of light from some far-off horizon in the history
of the human race, shot momentarily athwart the
troubled scene of our national weights and measures.
Those institutions had existed from the earliest times
known to our literature, an heirloom among the Anglo-
Saxon peoples and a late first-rate American writer,
;
as well as statesman (John Quincey Adams), equally

claiming with ourselves to be descended from that
ancient stock, but without any necessary prejudice
in favour of the wisdom of modem British Parlia-
ments, has expressed a very firm conviction that the
most perfect condition of those weights and measures,
even including all that was done for them by modern
savants under the reign of George IV., was in the
earliest known times of Saxon history and connects
;
itself much more with an ancient Royal residence at
Winchester, than a modern one in London or Windsor.

It may have been earlier still and
; the system had already
fallen into such republican, many-headed, confusion in
the times of King John, that the Charter, to the joy of
all men, said that in future there was only to be one
200 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part III.
standard of measure throughout the land ;* while, to

render that principle a possible one to carry out in
practice, wisdom counselled, and ancient Saxon practice
reminded, that grand standards both of length and
weight should be immediately constructed, and copies
thereof dispatched to all parts of the kingdom.
But what followed ?
That which too uniformly follows when a generous
people, roused for a time to the care and assertion of
their rights, trust all to the word of unwilling,
despotically inclined rulers ; and then relax once more
into passive obedience and dull routine.
Those standard measures, if ever made, were lost no ;
copies were sent to country districts the Magna;
Charta lawyers were ignorant of the most vital facts

(as abundantly evidenced by their verbally ordaining
that the quarter was to be the national measure for
corn, but leaving the people in ignorance of what measure
or weight it was the fourth part) ]* and then came a
;
certain very natural consequence.

Practical weights and measures are not only of in-
terest,but essential importance to all classes of the realm
for, as was well said years ago, all the productions of
land and labour, of nature and art, and of every concern

and condition of life, are bought, sold, or estimated by
* " Measures are wanted for two distinct objects, the commercial and
the scientific. The wants of natural philosophy have grown up within
the last two centuries ; while so early as Magna Charta it was one of the
concessions to the grievances of the subject that there should be one
weight and one measure throughout the land," says the late Lord
Brougham's chief educational authority not knowing, however, that the
;
epoch of Magna Charta, instead of being primeval, is very middle-aged

indeed, in the real history of British weights and measures.
t A.D. 1215. Magna Charta, Sect. 35 :—
" There shall be but one uniform standard of weights, measures, and
manufactures that for com shall be the London quarter."
;
"Magna Charta," says Dr. Kelly, in his "Metrology," 1816, "points

out the quarter of London as the only standard for measures and weights
of that time, but we are left to guess of what measure or weight it was
the quarter part."
Chap. XL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 201
them. Hence, weights and measures have been very

properly defined as the foundation of justice, the safe-
guard of property, and the rule of right while the laws of ;
honour peculiarly abhor any fraud in this respect. Yet

withal, says the same authority, it is to the common
people, in every country, to whom the business of
weighing and measuring almost exclusively com-
is
mitted. Whence, in part, by evident necessity, it comes

that weights and measures are primarily affairs of the
working of the poor, and those who with
classes,
their own hands do the daily work of the world not ;
of the rich, who luxuriously inhale the sweets and

tempting quintessence thereof, without vulgar toil
without any racking anxieties so to economise their
daily bread as just to be able to make both ends meet.
They, i.e. the rich, and even the classes between them
and the workers, viz., mercantile men, and various em-
ployers of labour, can perfectly well afford in their
lordly mansions comfortable counting-houses, to
or
reckon up their gains in terms of any measures, or of
any language, whatever under the sun, when balancing
their account-books at stated intervals but the working ;
poor, in their daily, ceaseless, occupations, have neither

the education, nor the time, nor the opportunity to deal
with more than one language and one set of measures.
And these last, to be fully useful, must come to
them, in every item, just as naturally as the mother-
tongue is felt to do in after-life ; for who is there,
unless experienced in practical matters himself, who
knows how suddenly and immediately, in many of the
constant affairs of the working world, an unexpected
exigency occurs when, without books, or scales, or
;
balances, the labouring man, whether

or compasses,
whether agriculturist or engineer,
sailor or coal-miner,
has to look some natural danger in the face and his ;
only hope of plucking the flower, " safety," from the

event, is in his then and there instantly concluding,

without instrumental assistance, without time for
serious thought or metrical examination, upon a nearly
correct estimate of some measure of weight, or length of
space, or strength of material, or angle of slope, before
the catastrophe arrives.
The working man, too, must have convenient natural
standards also to refer to at certain times, both to
correct the estimate of his mere feelings, and keep up
as well an outward proof, as an inward ideal, of justice
in his dealings with those around him, but in the
terms he loves best. So what was the consequence
when the restored king and government of A.D. 1215,
having got the rule of the country once again into
their power, did not send the promised standards to
every town and village in the land ? Why, every town
and every village began to make standard measures for
themselves, and for their own immediate knots of
society, rich men and poor, farmers, artisans, and mer-
chants, in their small and often very isolated pro-
vincial communities.
Within a certain range that was tolerable enough ;
because all these examples j)ro tern, were more or less
closely founded on, or were tolerably representative in

some way or another of, the original Saxon standards,
and were named with names derived from the same
effective language but beyond that range of temporary
;
service, — then began the mediaeval confusion worse con-

founded which has reigned in our national weights and
measures ever since. Under the same name, at the
same epoch, all sorts of different subdivisions of the
same original quantities have been intended in different
parts of the country and, in such various country-side
;
parts,through a long series of years, what astounding

names, not unfrequently for the same thing, have not
been invented out of the wealth and depth of the

mother tongue !
The late Dr. Young collected as many as would have

filleda small dictionary,* and the general progress of
the nation was not at that time found free from ex-
ceptional results in this direction. For, as civilization
progressed, wealth asserted its interests too powerfully ;
and lawyers were always any num-

attainable, to frame
ber of acts of parliament to secure rent and taxes
being drawn from the working poor in any and every
denomination but to prevent their deriving profits
;
from their work, unless a statute standard was rigidly

adhered to.
That holding up to view the importance of one grand
national standard, was indeed in so far (for it was evi-
dently one-sided) very excellent but unfortunately,
;
the powers that were went on framing their acts of

parliament without either defining, making, or identi-
fying any such standard. The taking of scientific
steps really to do that, seemed to men of the pen,
the law, and schools of high mental philosophy, a
base mechanic operation, which their ethereal line of
studies placed them far above the level of It was a
drudgery they would not submit to and even up to ;
the other day (1814), when at last it was impressed on

the governing bodies that, in the material matter of
weights and measures, there must be material standards,
— they appointed a yard, which was to bear a certain
proportion to a second's pendulum of a specially named
* The following is an example from one division of his report :— Awm,

hag, bale, basket, bat, beatment, billet, bind, bing, boll, bolt, bolting,
bottle, bout, box, bucket, bunch, bundle, burden, cabot, cade, canter,
caroteel, carriage, cart, cartload, case, cast, cheef, chest, clue, cord, corf,
cran, cranock, cut, cyvar, cyvelin, daugh, dish, drop, duffer, &c. &c.
*'
Mr. Adderley said that in his country there were thirty-six different
bushels, and he was informed that in Lancashire there were more than
double that number." —
" Report of Discussion in the House of Commons,
14th May, 1864."
204 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part HI.
and legally described scientific order ; but what length

that pendulum was of in very fact, they did not inquire ;
for they said, " any expert watchmaker could ascer-

;
tain that " and yet up to the present time neither
watchmaker nor philosopher, nor government official of
any kind or degree, has fully succeeded in that little
problem.
So the confusion of weights and measures only grew
worse in the kingdom, while other branches of civiliza-
tion continually progressed. About the year 1700 A.D.,
the Government, through the Attorney-General, had in-
stituted an accusation against a merchant for cheating
the revenue by using false gallons and he, the mer-
;
chant, successfully proved that it was the Government's

own appointed gallon that he had followed, and that
Government did not know what they had been legislating
on the subject.*
That was a grievous exposure but the fault was
;
easily thrown on the poor working men, when a Parlia-

mentary Committee superciliously reported in 1758,
that of those uneducated beings, but who had hitherto
borne all the toil and burden of the work, only a few of
*'
A little after 1700 an information was tried in the Exchequer against
one Baxter, for having imported more Alicant wine than he had paid
duty for. On the part of the Crown it was contended that the sealed
gallon at Guildhall (said to contain 231 cubic inches) was the standard.
But the defendant appealed to the law, which required that a standard
gallon should be kept at the Treasury proved that there was such a
;
gallon at the Treasury, containing 282 cubic inches and established, by

;
the evidence of the oldest persons in the trade, that the butts and hogs-
heads which came from Spain had always contained the proper number
of the real standard gallons. A juror was withdrawn, and the law officers
of the Crown took no further proceedings except procuring the above Act
(*An Act of 5 Anne, cap. 27, for arresting the further decrease of the
gallon below 231 inches'). A better instance of confusion could hardly
be imagined the legal gallon had gradually been diminished more than
;
60 cubic inches the merchants in one particular trade continued to

;
import and to pay duty by the real gallon, and were finally called to
account by the Attorney- General, who, in common with the rest of the
world, had forgotten what a real gallon was, and sued for penalties upon
appeal to what was no more a legal standard than the measure in a pri-
vate shop." Fenny Cyclopc^dia.
•
them were able heretofore to make proper measures or

weights ; standards were carelessly made and destroyed
as defective, and the unskilfulness of the artificers,
joined to the ignorance of those who were to size and

check the weights and measures, occasioned all sorts
of varieties to be dispersed through the kingdom,
which were all deemed legal, yet disagreed.
Other independent-minded persons, however, ven-
tured to report, and perhaps more justly, that another
cause of this confusion was " the prodigious number of
acts of parliament, whereby the knowledge of weights
and measures became every year more and more mys-
terious." In 1823 it was stated by Dr. Kelly, in his
examination before the House of Lords, " that there
had been upwards of two hundred laws enacted without
success in favour of conformity, and five hundred various
measures in defiance of those laws." Both sets of acts
of parliament, too, were in opposition to that law of the
practical nature of things, which ordains that every-
thing in connection with weights and measures shall be
done in direct reference to material examples thereof.
But, in 1824, a standard yard and a standard pound

were at last deposited in the House of Commons ; and
the Legislature enjoyedadvantage of having a
the
moderately accurate example before them, of the prac-
tical thing they were legislating about. This pleasure,
however, only lasted about ten years for in October, :
1834, both yard and pound perished in the Great Fire

which consumed the two Houses of Parliament.
Then was made another insane attempt to get on
without any standards at all to collect revenue by the
;
threat of a standard, and yet have no standard to refer

to. Lawyers, therefore, had it all their own way in this
pleasant fiction and in an act of parliament (5 and 6
;
2o6 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part III.
William IV. c. 63), which passed both assemblies in the

following year, " the standards were referred to as if
still in existence, and quoted as authorities to be ap-
pealed to on every occasion, although they had been
actually destroyed a twelvemonth before, and no other
standards submitted in their stead,"
Both Houses of Parliament certainly appeared to have
been wholly ignorant of this actual non-existence of the
objects on which they were legislating. But some per-
sons said for them, that they were not, and never had
been, entirely dependent on their late legalized parlia-
mentary standards for Government had an ancient
;
standard of its own, to which extra-conscientious

ministers might refer when there was grave occasion.
Curiosity was .excited. There had been indeed once
two standards in the Exchequer, descended from some-
what historical times {i.e. Queen Elizabeth's) one of ;
45 inches, the other of 36. The former, the more

accurate of the two, seems to have been allowed to drop
out of sight altogether at some period unknown ; and
the latter was abused, instead of used, in a degree
directly proportionate in latter days to the nation's
advance in wealth, the growth of geodesic science
amongst learned men, and the increase of general atten-
tion to the scientific subject of standards in foreign
countries.
when some inquiries were
For, so far back as 1742,
set on foot by both the Koyal Society of London, and
the Paris Academy of Sciences, the Exchequer standards
were then in a respectable condition and seemed to be
;
treated with attention and care, by the high officers and

clerks of the establishment. But no one had heard of
them again for a long interval. And when their habita-
tion was at length revisited in 1835, to see the founda-
tion on which the government of good King William
was then legislating, Mr. Baily reports of the then single
Chap. XI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 207
standard, and apparently the only one,* it was •'

that
impossible to speak of it too much
and con- in derision
tempt. A common kitchen poker, filed at the end in
the rudest manner by the most bungling- workman,
would make as good a standard. It has been broken
asunder," he writes, " and the two pieces have been dove-
tailed together, but so badly that the joint is nearly as
loose as a pair of tongs. The date of the fracture I
could not ascertain, it having occurred beyond the
memory or knowledge of any of the officers at the Ex-
chequer. And yet, till within the last ten years, to the
disgrace of this country, copies of this measure have
been circulated all over Europe and America, with a
parchment document accompanying them (charged with
a stamp that costs £3 10s., exclusive of official fees),
certifying that they are the true copies of the British
standard.'^
These are severe remarks ; and partly help to answer
the noted difficulty which Dr. Kelly found himself
confronted with, after all his historical researches up to
his own time ; viz., that in England there is nothing
grow worse, or, curiously
that has a greater tendency to
enough, more obstinately resists improvement, than
weights and measures," Yet the Exchequer itself has
indicated the full truth of Mr. Baily's critique, by
publishing the Astronomer Koyal's very similar views ;
* Since the above was written, an unusually good parliamentary report

has appeared, drawn up by Mr. Chisholm, chief clerk in the office of the
Comptroller-General of the Exchequer, on "The Exchequer Standards of
Woif^ht and Measure " mentioning a yard rod, a gallon, and two bushels
;
of Henry VII. ; a yard measure and an ell, together with pints, quarts,
gallons, bushels, and troy and avoirdupois weights of Quoen Elizabeth,
besides several other weights and measures of the early Norman kings,
and not regarded as standards.
Of the above Exchequer standards, so-called, the yard rod of Henry VII.
is that which was expressly stated, in 1743, to have been for a long time
disused as a standard the ell rod of Queen Elizabeth is that which also
;
dropped into disuse between 1743 and 1835 while the yard rod of the
;
same queen is that which was reported on by Mr. Baily to the Royal
Astronomical Society in 1835, as horrible in workmanship, and with lis
length shortened by a dovetail.
2o8 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part III.
first, on tlie error in the general theory of British

legislation on the subject of standards, as shown in
" the entire apathy on the part of Government towards
the matter, whereby it acts only when pressed by
popular demands;" and second, the error in the prac-
tice of the British Executive, which is, within its
functions, not much unlike the above leading also to
;
such exposures of our chief political statesmen as the

following, extracted from Mr. Chisholm's report :
" In answer to a question upon this subject in the
House of Commons, Sir George Grey is reported to have

said (see Hansard) that the standards (Exchequer) had
'
been examined some adjustment was found necessary,

;
and measures would be taken to have them verified.'

It is probable that the answer of the Home Secretary
was imperfectly heard or misapprehended, as no exami-
nation, comparison, or adjustment whatever of the Ex-
chequer standards has been made."
Since then, however, some members of her Majesty's
Government have advanced in metrological knowledge
a new office has been created for the subject and placed
under the care of the same Mr. Chisholm, late chief clerk
in the Exchequer, with the title of " Warden of the
Standards;" and a gentle current of interest has so
decidedly begun to flow towards the subject, that one
or two of the oratorical leaders on ordinary political
topics have graciously intimated, that when that current
shall have become stronger they may then perhaps
find it worth their while to utilize its motive power,
and in their own way and for their own purposes con-
sider, what can be done for, or with, our British national
and hereditary weights and measures.
Too late ! too late ! for while these politicals were

dallying with their national duties, a mine has been
sprung beneath their feet. The merchants and manu-
Chap. XI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 209
facturers of the country, with a section of the scientific

men, chiefly of the electrician and chemical stamp,
have burst into the arena, and declare that they cannot
wait for the slow improvements of Government. They
want, they haste, to be rich. The creed that they almost
worship consists in " buying in the cheapest, and selling
in the dearest, market," or making money with the
utmost speed * and as they fancy that their operations
!
receive a momentary check in some foreign countries,

by the different metrological systems there and here,
so immediately, without weighing the whole case, with-
out allowing the mass of the population to have a voice
in that which is their affair, which is as ancient and
necessary to them, the people, as their very language,
and without considering whether, by breaking down the
barriers between France and Frenchified countries and
ourselves, they may not be raising up other obstacles
between ourselves as so altered, and Russia, f America
—
and Australia, they, these new intruders into the
scene, are calling out and demanding that French
weights and French measures shall be instantly adopted
by law from one end of Great Britain to the other
under pains and penalties, too, of the most compulsory
order, and enforced by a new and special description
of highly paid officials to be appointed for that sole
purpose.
In the midst of such a headlong pursuit of mere
See Mr. John Taylor's work, " Wealth the Number of the Beast."
t Amongst many other symptoms of strong and youthful vitality, and
promise of its future pre-eminence in the affairs of the world, Russia
scorns to adopt the French units of measure. Some interested parties
recently went to St. Petersburg, trying: to persuade its citizens to adopt
the French system, on the plea that Belgium, Holland, Sardinia, Tuscany,
Spain, Portugal, Greece, Switzerland, and several countries of South
America, had already joined it, and that Great Britain was just going to
do 80. But Russia whs nothing moved by that, and though all the world
was going to submit itself to France, she, Russia, was not she knew the
;
value of her own hereditary measures, connected at one point with the
British system, and she would as soon give up her language aa her
ancient metrology, adapted to, and loved by, her people.
P
wealth, as this unprecedented tampering with the pre-

historic possessions of our nation, for such a purpose,
would be, the poor are unfortunately the first to go to
the wall. They may have been somewhat curbed and
bridled in past times by kings and barons and Govern-
—
ment servants, but what is that to the oppression of
merchants and mill-masters hasting to be rich, and
freely sacrificing thereto any patriotic sentiments and
historical associations which their " hands " may pre-
sume to indulge in ?
There not indeed a completer way than by such a

is
forced introduction of foreign units, for treading out the

desire for national independence amongst our poorer
classes, the chief material, after all, of our army and
navy in war, and main strength in peace and for ;
telling every man of them, and twenty times a day,

whether he is in the field or whether he is in the
house, that his convenience and comfort in necessaries
are sacrificed to schemings for still more riches to come
to those who are abeady overflowingly rich and that ;
the poor man's fine traditional aspirations for the per-

petuity of the British name, are held subservient amongst
his latest rulers to lower and less patriotic ideas of the
hour. While even the very " People's House " of the
Legislature with their Committee of 1862 arrived, in
their own words, unanimously at the Macchiavellian
conclusion, " cautiously and steadily to introduce into
this country the French metric system, adopting its
nomenclature also ; merely legalising its use,
at first
and it compulsory :" and

then, after a time, rendering
never, perhaps, expecting to hear the Nemesian cry
raised against them, the cry which, when issuing from
the rank and file, has proved the speedy death-knell of
a great empire within the last three years " Nous
—
sommes trahis " (" We are betrayed ").
The Committee were indeed told, from the reports of
Chap. XL] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 2 1
the Astronomer Koyal and elsewhere, "that the said"

forcible introduction of foreign weights and measures
into Great Britain would be to the eoccessively great
inconvenience of 9,999 persons out of every 10,000
of the population, and the gain to the one person
in 10,000 only small; and that any interference of
Government for compelling the use of foreign measures
in the ordinary retail business of the country would be
intolerable; that they could not enforce their penal
laws in one- instance in a thousand, and in that one
it would be insupportahly Yet all the
oppressive.''
effect that this wise, salutary, and truly charitable in-
formation produced on the politico-pretence merchants
of peace principles, with Mr. Cobden himself amongst
them, was " to look forward to a comprehensive and
exact system of inspection, and the establishment of
an efficient central department to give force and unity
to local action." In fact, to act like a German army
in undisputed possession of a foreign country, and put
down at all costs amongst the British people any
national feelings for historical institutions of their own ;
for things which, however they may have been meddled

with by modem acts of parliament, are still substan-
tially the same as those which the origines of the
nation received, the nation itself does not know how or
where, or exactly when ; though they areawarefully
that they have possessed them as long as they have
ever been a nation at all, or from before the birth of
any history amongst us and they, the mass of the
;
working people, understand the outside world thoroughly,

familiarly, intuitively, only in terms of them.
No wonder the Tiinnes wrote on July 9th, 1863 :
"A very great trial is impending over this free and

happy country. It is not the loss of our cotton trade,
of our colonies, of our prestige, or our maritime
supremacy. It is a change that would strike far deeper
and wider than any of these for there is not a house-

;
hold it would not fill with perplexity, confusion, and

shame. From a division in the House of Commons
yesterday, it appears that we are seriously threatened
with a complete assimilation of all our weights and
measures to the French system. Three years are given
to unlearn all the tables upon which all our buying and
selling, hiring and letting, are now done. Three years
are supposed to be amply sufiicient for undoing and
obliterating the traditions of every trade, the accounts
of every concern, the engagements of every contract,
and the habits of every individual. But we very much
doubt whether the general shopkeepers, who take pos-
session of the comers of our small streets, or the green-
grocers, will be able in three years to translate their
accounts into Duas, Hectos, Kilos, Myrias, Steres, and
Litres, Metres, Millimetres, Centimetres, and the hun-
dred other terms extracted by our ingenious neigh-
bours from Latin or Greek, as may happen to suit
their purposes. Is the House of Commons, then, really
prepared to see the votes, the reports, the returns
of the revenue, the figures of the national debt, all
run up in paper francs and actually paid in gold

Napoleons ?"
The accomplishment, however, of so undesirable a
result seems to have been postponed for a time by the
Parliamentary proceedings of May 4th, 1864 ; when
Mr. Ewart's bill, two readings, was withdrawn in
after
deference to another proposal brought up by Mr. Milner
Gibson. But as Mr. Cobden professed himself quite
unable to see the difference between the two, though
allowing there might be some, —
and we know already
what are the ultimate compulsory intentions of the
promoters of the bill, —
it is plain that the thin end of
the wedge is already introduced to attempt to destroy

our British hereditary metrology.
i
Chap. XI.] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 2 1
Thus far, nearly, was written in the first edition of

this book, published in 1864; but now in 1873-4,
what is the state of matters ?
Well, their condition is surely most passing strange
for, bill after bill has been brought into Parliament,
agitators have been atwork throughout the land, defec-

tions from the national cause have occurred by the
thousand, scientific men have turned coat, and those
who a few years ago gave the most splendid testimony
that to force foreign measures on the British people
would aggravate them to the extent of civil war, those
who in an earlier state of society would have died
rather than abandon their best opinions and patriotic
creeds, —
have now been signing propositions on the other
side, and even assisting in putting up at the Palace of
Westminster, side by side, copies of the British and
French standards of length, as though the Government
of France ruled already over half of the British people.
Other renegade scientific men, encouraged too by
some of the chief scientific societies, have been publish-
ing new text-books in science for, if possible, all the
schools and
colleges in the empire ; wherein, though
they condescend to use the English language, they
still
scorn to be loyal to the English authorized weights

and measures but speak of everything "in the heavens
;
above and the earth below in the new French metrical

terms, which they seem to have sworn together they
will make
this country accept, whether it likes it or
not.* While in the elementary schools which are now
springing up under Government headship and School
Board management all over the country, teachers are
* In the letters which have appeared in "Nature," from H.M.S.
Challenger' s scientific expedition, carried on at an expense of not less than
£20,000 a year to the British people, those contemned individuals have
the distances steamed over by their British ship, by means of British coal,
described to them in kilometrea ; and even a little piece of chalk, bronj^ht
up by the dredge from the ocean-bottom, is defined for size to British
readers by fractional part* of a metre.
2 14 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part III.
urged, induced, -encouraged from some secret quarters

to take by
time, witk its expected political changes,
anticipation, and teach all the children within their
reach at once the French weights and measures or ;
when they cannot do openly in defiance or prosti-

that,
tution of what the schools were established for, at least
to have some printed representation of the French
system suspended in sight, as though it were soon
going to he the law of the land.
And yet, notwithstanding all these questionable pro-
ceedings, every attempted bill has failed before Parlia-
ment and another bill yet, which is to be brought in
;
this very year (1873) will have to go through the

Sisypheian labour of the others, or of beginning the
task again where Mr. E wart's bill of 1864 began, as
well as ended.*
How they all came to fail, is almost as deep a mys-
tery, as how and whence the irrepressible and untiring
energy to bring them forward again and again, is
derived ;though two good speeches were delivered

for
against the last bill, what were they to the torrent of
declamation on the other side, —
claiming, too, to be the
side of liberal opinion, of modern science, of political
advance, of mercantile wealth, of organized industries,
of all civilization, and indeed of everything but — nation-
ality, history, and religion.
Those three ought, of course, to be a powerful trio ;
in other countries too, as well as our own but the ;
two latter of them were not invoked in the Parliamen-

tary discussion at all. Indeed, they were apparently
not understood by either party as in any way belonging
to the subject so that whatever political ferment has
;
been made hitherto by the metrological question, it is
* At the time of going through the press this event has already
occurred; Mr. Benjamin Smith's bill having been withdrawn, and a
promise given that Government is to take up the subject next year.
Chap. XI.] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 2 1
nothing to what is inevitably to come, and all the

world over too, when its full importance has been
understood and its profligate treatment at the hands of
;
rulers during the present hour, appreciated by the rising

and indignant masses of all civilized nations.
Just now, or up to the present time, therefore, the
fight has merely been between the would-be introducers
of the new French metric system, and the defenders of
the British national system as it is. These latter men
will have no change, simply because they dislike all
change, and have been getting on after a fashion well
enough hitherto but they cannot expect on those prin-
;
ciples to have the victory in future fights always given

into their hand especially when they can neither pre-
:
tend to prove that the British metrology is everything

that it might be to suit the advanced wants of the
present high state of civilization and science nor ;
demonstrate that it is still, all that it once was, for

general social purposes in that primeval time when the
system was first given as an heirloom to the Saxon
race, before they came to these islands. This latter
position is, indeed, suflficiently indicated from our
sketch, meagre though it is, of the political history of
British weights and measures from the days of Edgar
the Peaceable on his throne of Winchester, down to the
present hour. And when throughout that long in-
terval, these most precious units and standards have
always been neglected by our chief rulers for the time
being, and left without guidance to underlings or in-
terlopers to manipulate almost at pleasure, how could
we expect Government, with ever so good intentions,
to have either safely preserved, or wisely built up, our
metrological traditions ?
When Dr. Kelly found reason to remark, that

through all our modern history our weights and mea-
sures had always been growing worse, rather thrn
better, —
^he might well have risen to the idea that at
some primeval age they must have been of strange and

even surpassing excellence. But it was not given to
him, or any scientist in that reign, to perceive the logical
bearings of the case so clearly wherefore weights and
:
measures went on in a doomed course towards a sea of

trouble destined to surge over many nations.
Louis Napoleon may have disappeared, a defeated
man; but before he fell from power he had engaged the
then Prussian king, now German emperor, to abolish
the ancient national German measures and establish the
new French ones in their stead, when the year 1872 or
1874 should arrive. And now that haughty potentate
must either swallow his words, undo much preparator}'-
legislation,and break faith with the metrical men, or —
will have, whether in his own, or in his son's time, to
enter into contention with the masses of the German
people who have raised him to his present throne by
their intense Germanism ; but never gave him authority
to tamper with their hereditary German gifts and pos-
sessions ;theirs from before the time that they say
St. Paul visited them as the Galatians.
"Oh !" but joyfully argue some men, " it would be so
gloriously promotive of modern science, for one set only
of weights and measures to be used and referred to by
the scientific men of all nations." Yet that is only a
resuscitation of a cruel fallacy of the middle ages viz.,;
to try to keep up Latin as a common language among

all scientists whatever language their poor fellow-
countrymen spoke. A demoralizing and suicidal fallacy ;
because it was found in practice infinitely more im-

portant, patriotic, charitable, for each scientific man to
have no secrets, no mysteries from the masses of those
poor, but worthy, and often most religiously-minded
men around him and whose friendly encompassing of
;
him in that manner, was the very source of the quiet

Chap. XI.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 2 1
and leisurewhich he enjoyed for his own prosecution

of science. Wherefore the first professor who gave a
scientific lecture in the vulgar tongue in a German
university, was rightly held to have made almost as
precious, useful, and fruitful a reform, as that priest
who began the system of publicly praying, and reading
the Scriptures, in the language of the people.
There is, indeed, something to be said for choice, or
regulation, of weights and measures coming from the
side of science but the people were in the field before
;
science, and have the first and largest interest in them

still. Neither is it in the power of any scientific men,
with, all their science up to its very latest developments,
to invent a truly national set of weights and measures,
any more than they can make a national language and
a national people.
Before the Flood, according to the Bible, there was

no division of mankind into nations that was a divine
;
appointment afterwards, together with the creation of

their tongues, the appointment of their bounds, and,
there are good reasons for believing, the assignment of
their weights and measures. And if that was the case,
a direct and intentional effort by men to subvert them
now entirely, is not likely to succeed, however many
scientists put their shoulders to the wheel.
But the French metrical system, in its acts and
ambitions, is precisely such an attempt in these days to
dethrone the primeval system of weights and measures
amongst all nations and make all mankind speak in
;
future in that new and artificial metrological language,

invented only eighty years ago in Paris. And if there
issound reason for believing in the Divine appointment
of the ancient systems, this new antagonist to them
otight to have been ushered in under some very con-
trary influence.
How, then, was it brought to the light of day ?
By
the wildest, most bloodthirsty, and most atheistic
revolution of a whole nation, that the world has ever
seen. And, attempt to conceal it as they may, our
present meek-looking but most designing promoters for
introducing the French system amongst us (and I hear
from Birmingham that there is a lady also among them,
loudly petitioning Government for its compulsory
establishment, forsooth, over our whole nation) those —
meek-looking geniuses, I say, cannot wipe out from
the page of history, that, simultaneously with the
elevation of the metrical system in Paris, the French
nation (as represented there), did for themselves
formally abolish Christianity, burn the Bible, declare
God be a non-existence, a mere invention of the
to
priests, and institute a worship of humanity, or of
themselves, under the title of the Goddess of Reason ;
while they also ceased to reckon time by the Christian

era, trod on the Sabbath and its week of seven days,
and began a new reckoning of time for human history
in years of their then new French Republic, and in
decades of days so as to conform in everything to their
own decimal system, rather than to Revelation.
Mere human telling was not enough to remind our
British metrical agitators of those fearful things : so
they have had them not sounded but
again only, re-
peated too in fact, within the last three years, in blood
and fire and blackest of smoke throughout the same city
of Paris, —
when the Commune, on getting for a time
the upper hand, immediately re-established the Re-
publican era as against the Christian, and declared war
against every traditional observance and respect of man.
While since then, the still more savage and merciless
proceedings of the Spanish commune, wherever it has
had an opportunity of rising in their cities, shows that
the heart of man, unregenerated in Christ, is no whit
Chap. XL] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 2 1
better in the present day than at any epoch throughout

all antiquity.
Now, perhaps, —and without pursuing any further

this historic part of the subject of weights and mea-
sures, which, though as old as Cain and Seth, if not
Abel also, is by no means yet played out on the stage
of time, — it may be
given to a favoured, predestined
few, to begin to understand, on a figure once used by
Dr. Chalmers, what extensive armaments of what two
dread opposing spiritual powers may be, without our
knowledge, engaging in battle around our little isle,
contending there — on this subject, too, as well as many

others — for mighty issues through all eternity. So
that not for the force of the sparse oratory emitted in
defence of British metrology before Parliament, were the
bills of the pro-French metrical agitators so often over-
throAvn, but for the sins rather of that high-vaulting
system itself ; and to prevent a chosen nation, a nation
preser^êd through history thus far by much more than
the wisdom of its rulers, —to prevent that nation un-
heedingly robing itself in the accursed thing and ;
unknowingly throwing away an institution which it

was intended to keep until the accomplishment of the
mystery of God touching the human race.
A very close approach to the dangerous cliff was
made only a dozen years ago, when the Government's
own Standards Commission, not content with the yard
in place of the inch being pronounced a new British
unit, must also propose to drop the original inch
entirely; inventing new names for multiples of 1,000
and 2,000 of their new unit yard, to take the place of
tlie British mile and subdividing it again as a con-
;
crete quantity into a totally unheard-of set of small

lengths, such as neither we nor our fathers ever knew,
to supersede and obliterate what have hitherto well
2 20 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part III.
served all the smaller, and most of the exact, purposes

of Anglo-Saxon life and existence.
But happily the Commissioners' hands were stayed

—
and one of their number the highest approach to the
ideal of a philosopher since the days of Newton that
this country has produced, the late Sir John Herschel
(whose remains now repose in Westminster Abbey)
was presently gifted to see, that of all the various length
measures now on the statute-book, the inch (which was
then in such imminent danger) is by far the most really
important, because the true and original unit and source
of all the others. This idea too seemed continually to
grow in Sir John Herschel' s mind. For, through the
inch, he perceived that all the British weights and
measures might be easily made (once again perhaps)
most scientifically earth commensurable and without
;
the popular value of any of the chief units or standards,

or even their names, being interfered with.
That grand principle, too, of earth commensurability,
or that there should be a complete and harmonious
scale of numerical relations connecting the small units
employed by man in his petty constructions on the
earth, with the grander units laid outby the Creator in
the sky. Sir John Herschel stood up splendidly for and :
argued and wrote for the glorious idea really belonging

to British metrology, in various parts of the country but ;
in vain His colleagues on the Standards Commission

!
could see no beauty nor desirability in that which he

esteemed so highly unless it was those of them who
:
claimed something of the same earth-commensurable

principle,though in a less perfect form, for the French
metre and tliey wished to abolish the entire British
:
system. So after doing all that he could to convince,

demonstrate, persuade, with the effect only of finding
that the majority were determined to sacrifice every-
thing to France, he took the final course for a great
Chat. XI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 221
—
and honest man to take he gave up what had been
an honour to fifty years of his life, his place at the
Standards Commission, his prospects of power or in-
fluence in Government appointments, and went out —
from amongst them all, alone, wounded in spirit and
lowered, perhaps, in the eyes of many but nobly ;
nerved to carry on the battle single-handed, in the

open world outside, against the metrical mania of the
day : a strange disease, which Sir John Herschel
(the equal to whom, not Cambridge herself could show
at the greatest of all competitive examinations) deemed
not only anti-national, but, in spite of all that is so fre-
quently said for it, not of the highest science either.
This case, I fear, is the one, only, bright example
which British science has shown in our day, of a
scientist who would suffer in place, in power, and in
worldly, social dignity, for opinion and did so a man,
;
: —
therefore, in whom a great nation might trust in any dire
emergency and who, when the last pro-French metrical
;
bill was about to be urged before the House, came to
the defence of his country's cause with the following

letter to the Editor of the Times :
—
" 81K,
•* As Mr. Ewart's Bill for the compulsory
abolition of our whole
system of British weights and measures, and the introduction in its place
of the French metrical Hystem comes on for its second reading on the 13th
proximo, I cannot help thinking that a brief statement of the comparative
de facto claims of our British units and of the French on abstract scientific
grounds may, by its insertion in your pages, tend to disabuse the minds
of such, if any, of our legislators who may lie under the impression (I be-
lieve a very common one among all classes) that our system is devoid of
a natural or rational basis, and as such can advance no d priori claim to
maintain its ground.
" De facto, then, though not de jure {i.e. by no legal definition existing
in the words of an art of parliament, but yet practically verified in our
parliamentary standards of length, weight, and capacity as they now
exist), our British units refer themselves as well and as naturally to the
length of the earth's polar axis as do the French actually existing
standards, to that of a quadrant of the meridian passing through Paris,
and even in some rcHpects better, while the former basis is in itself a
preferable one.
" To show this I shall assume as our British unit of length the imperial
222 OUR INHERITANCE [Part III.
foot ;of weight the imperial ounce and of capacity the imperial half-
;
pint and shall proceed to state how they stand related to certain proto-
;
types, which I shall call the geometrical ounce, foot, and half-pint and ;
shall then institute a similar comparison between the French legally

authenticated metre, gramme, and litre in common use with their (equally
ideal, because nowhere really existing) prototypes supposed to be derived
from the Paris meridian quadrant, distinguishing the former as the
practical, the latter as the theoretical, French units.
*'
Conceive the length of the earth's axis as divided into jive hundred
million equal parts or geometrical inches.
" Then we will define: — 1.A geometrical foot as twelve such geome-
trical inches ; a geopietrical half-pint, as the exact hundredth part of a
geometrical cubic foot ; and, 3, a geometrical ounce as the weight of one
exact thousandth part of a geometrical cubic foot of distilled water, the
weighing being performed, as our imperial system prescribes, in air of 62**
Fah., under a barometric pressure of 30 inches.
" In like manner the theoretical kilogramme and litre of the French are
decimally referred to their theoretical metre on their own peculiar con-
ventions as to the mode of weighing.
—
"This premised (1) the imperial foot is to the geometrical in the exact
proportion of 999 to 1,000 (nine hundred and ninety-nine to a thousand),
a relation numerically so exact that it maybe fairly considered as mathe-
matical ; and 2 and 3, the imperial half-pint and ounce are, each of them,
to its geometrical prototype as 2,600 to 2,601.
" Turn we now to the practical deviations from their theoretical ideals
in the case of the French units. Here, again (1), the practical metre is
shorter than its theoretical ideal. The proportion is that of 6,400 to
6,401. The approximation is, indeed, closer, but the point of real import-
ance is the extreme numerical simplicity of the relation in our case, more
easily borne in mind, and more readily calculated on, in any proposed
case. 2 and 3. Any error in the practical value of the metre entails a
triple amount of aliquot error on the practical kilogramme and litre, so
that, in the cases of these units the proportion between their practical and
theoretical values is not that of 6,400 to 6,401, but of 2,133 to 2,134.
Here, then, the greater degree of approximation is in our favour ; and it
is to be observed that in our case this triplication of -error does not hold
good, since, by a happy accident, our standard pound has been fixed quite
independently of our standard yard, and our gallon is defined as 10 lbs.
of water.
*'
I am, Sir, your obedient Servant,
" J. F. W. Hekschel.
" CoLLiNGwooD, April dOth, 1869."
This is very clear so far: but its able author did not
go far enough. For while his grand fountain and source
of earth-commensurability for the British measures was
based, even by him, upon, not the foot, which he ulti-
mately used, but the inch, being an evenly earth
commensurable measure, and by the particular number
of Jive hundred millions of them, yet he afterwards
drops out of view both the inch, the five times of so
Chap. XI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 223
many parts, and says nothing about his new cubit

standard, which he was at that very time proposing
for the British nation, and prescribing that it should
consist of 5 X 5 of those inches, in place of their present
yard of thirty-six inches. Nor does the eminent astro-
nomer attempt to show that either the earth-commen-
surability or the terrestrial fiveness of the inch was any-
thing more than accidental. At all events, he does not
explain how by whom,
or when, or through what, or
that unit first and though he alludes to
came about ;
English history as far back as any printed acts of par-

liament may extend, he shows no faith capable of
tracing the fortunes of our nation up to those dim
periods of primeval story where the Bible is the only
book worth consulting.
Perhaps it was well, though, that Sir John Herschel
stopped where he did for time is required to enable
:
men effectually to receive the whole of any very new

idea ;and he did succeed at least in making some able
men pause in their mad career of abolishing, as having
nothing at all in them, the traditional British, standards
and units of measure. And had he, the most brilliant
representative of modern exact science, gone on further
still, and been the propounder of the Great Pyramid
source of tne wisdom of our ancient measures that :
they had been monumentalized there in the Siriad

land before history began, but yet in admirable earth
and heaven commensurability, and in a manner never
known to the profane Egyptians —
the sceptical modern
;
world would hardly have consented to believe, but that

the excellences of such a system were Sir John Her-
schel's own transcendent inventions and had arisen ;
much more through his brilliant grasp of modern acade-

ade-
one^
mical science, than by his simple readings in that stone
book of Revelation which stands on the Jeezeh liilU
open, though hitherto illegible, to
all mankind.
2 24 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pabt HI.
But for Jolin Taylor, who never pretended to be a

scientific man, propound the grand idea
to and for ;
—
the Scottish Astronomer, with scarce pay enough to
exist upon, and only a few old instruments, though in a
so-called Royal Observatory, at his hand both for pro-
fessional work, and to follow up the Great Pyramid clue
— was, and is, quite a different matter. Such plan was,
indeed, hardly less, than to let the stones of the Great
Pyramid themselves cry out to a heedless generation.
But, oh how effectively they cry for the few who will,
!
and do, give heed to them Only see how satisfactorily,

!
in our Part I., the Great Pyramid's first and simplest

mechanical features have helped us over Sir John
Herschel's enormous, and by him never solved, difficulty
of explaining why there was more meaning in the unit
inch going jive, rather than any other number of hun-
dred million times into the length of the earth's axis
of rotation. Let the reader presently judge, too, how
similarly gleaned Pyramid facts will enable us to assign
a date, a place, and an origin to the whole system,
capable of demanding the respect of all men, scientific
and on a far higher footing, moreover,

unscientific alike :
than anything that can be said for all the works of the
philosophers of Greece, the poems of Homer, or the
reputed wisdom of the Egyptians themselves.
Be it, however, our first and immediate part to
enter somewhat into practical applications ; or to set
forth in the four ensuing chapters what may be the most
probable schemes of subdivision and arrangement of the
Great Pyramid's grand standards to indicate their
;
points of contact with the British and Saxon metrologies

and allude to both their aids to the minds as well
as the bodies, and their promotiveness to the fulness of
thought as well as the material comforts, of universal
intellectual man.
Chap. Xn.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 22s
CHAPTER XII.
PYRAMID CAPACITY MEASURE.
rriHE grand standard of capacity in the Great Pyramid,

-- as already stated, is given by tlie contents of the
granite coffer at the further end of its final and so-called
King's Chamber ; and this vessel measures, as too it was
originally intended that it should, 71,250 cubic Pyramid
inches, or something very close thereto.
This whole quantity subdivides itself easily, after the
manner of the Pyramid arithmetic and Pyramid con-
struction, as follows : —
The two most important steps
being, first, the division into 4, as typifying the four
sides of the base ; and second, the division into 2,500,
or 50 X 50 parts fifty being the special number of the
;
room, and the number also of the masonry courses of

the whole structure on which that chamber, or rather
the two chambers of ten million cubic inches each, of
which it is composed, rest in their places.
Ptbamid Capacity Measure.
DiyiBion, or
number of each
We begin, therefore, with the large measured and

scientific quantity of the coffer ; and end with a unit
which, in an ajpproxhnate form, as a drop, {i.e., the
cubical space occupied by a drop of water falling freely
in air at a given Pyramid temperature and pressure), is
in every one's hands, and is definable accurately upon
the coffer by the stated proportion.

In contrasting this arrangement with the British
imperial system, we may see at once that that modern
system is merely a measure for large and rude
quantities, knowing of nothing smaller than the pint
(the gill being merely a later tolerated addition to suit
special and rendering it therefore necessary
wants),
for the and druggists to manufacture
apothecaries
a sort of fluid and capacity measure for themselves,
which they do by starting from the pint and ending
in the drop or, as they term it, with needless addition
;
of dog-latin, a " minim."

This apothecaries' fluid measure was established only
in 1836 and we may assume, with Lord Brougham's
;
Penny Cyclopcedia, that such fluid ounce, when it is an

ounce, is an ounce avoirdupois although it is stated
;
elsewhere, that medical men are never to use anything

but troy weight.
This incongruity renders the break between imperial,
i.e., the present British, capacity, and apothecaries' capa-
city, measures peculiarly trying followed as it is by a
;
break of connection between apothecaries' capacity, and

apothecaries' weight, measures also.
In the Pyramid arrangement, however, there is no
halting half-way ; but^ when it is a question of capacity,
the scheme goes right through from the biggest bulks
ever dealt with in commerce, and through all ^he
measures required by the people further in dealing with
coal, corn, wool, potatoes, beer, wine, peas, meal, oil,
medicines, photographicals, and chemicals, up to the
I
Chap. XH.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 227
smallest quantity ever judged of by capacity measures

of specified name when once we have arrived by
; for
several decimal stages at drops," no one would ever
''
think of subdividing them further, if they could, in any

other manner than by the tens of pure arithmetic again
and again.
Next, for the testing of these bulks •by weight, the
imperial system has only one strikingly even equivalent,
viz., the gallon, =10 lbs. of water weight. But that is
accompanied by the double drawback, 1st, that 10 lbs.

in weight is not an imperial known weight and 2nd, ;
that the gallon not the unit of the imperial system.

is
The unit of the imperial capacity system is a pint

and it is, moreover, the very important centre of con-
nection between that system for large ordinary quantities,
and the apothecaries' system for scientific and medical
small quantities. It is, therefore, the point of all others
in the scalewhich should be round and complete, test-
moment's notice by an equally round, well-
able also at a
known, and frequently employed standard of weight.
So it was too in the days of the wisdom, wherever
that was derived from, of our Saxon forefathers, or the
times of instinctive strength of our hereditary traditions ;
but under the luxurious, and very modem, reign of

George IV. that strange tendency to take measures from
the poor, and enlarge them more or less for the con-
venience chiefly of the rich, was rife so the pint, from ;
having been the unit, as one pound's weight of water,

was expanded into the odd quantity of 1 and \ pounds
of the same while the bigger measure of a gallon,
;
with which the poor man has seldom to deal, was

ordained to be the standard capable of being tested by a
round sum of 10 lbs., if that could be obtained or made
up from other weights.
This petty mauaaivring with some of the customary
old usages, if not also hereditary rights, of the poor, was
attempted, in tlie case of the new imperial pint, to be

electro-plated with brilliant proverbial mail, by Lord
Brougham's and the great " Diffusion of Useful Know-
ledge Society's " giving out this saying, to be learned
by all good subjects in these latter days,
"A pint of pure water,

^Weighs a pound and a quarter."
But, treason or no, I venture to doubt whether every

peasant has yet got that distich by heart and whether ;
he does not rather ruminate in his family circle and

about the old hearthstone over the far more ancient and
pithier rhyme,
"A pint's a pound,
All the world round;"
An expression, too, in which there may be vastly more

than immediately meets the eye seeing, as in our above
;
table, that the Pyramid system appears to restore the

principle embodied in those two little lines and may ;
have communicated it, in ages long gone by, to many

other countries also in part, who knows, to prove
:
them, if they could be faithful, and for how long, to

their ancient covenant.
Almost every one of the Pyramid capacity measures,
however, over and above its pint, admits of being tested
by a round number of "water-pounds;" and that number
is always such a one as we shall presently see equally
exists in the Pyramid system of weight measure.
We have, therefore, only to conclude this division of
the subject by submitting a table of comparison of each
concluded Pyramid capacity vessel, with each similarly
named current capacity vessel in Great Britain, through
means of the common medium of English cubic inches.
Whence it will be seen that, excepting the " coffer,"
(though even that is hardly altogether unknown to our
nation, " chaldron " having been under Anglo-Saxon
Chap. XH.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 229
rule an expression for, and a description of,* it), there

is no need to invent any new names ; for, under the
existing names, as of pints, gallons, &c., &c., the abso-
lute capacities have often varied much more than here
indicated,t and without a tithe of the reason for it.
Pyramid and British Capacity Measures,
Compared through the temporary medium of English cubic inches,
approximately.
Coflfer, Pyramid . =
Sack " Capacity Corn Measures.
Country or City.
Chap. XIII.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 23
CHAPTER XIII.
PYKAMID WEIGHT MEASURE.
rpHE weight measure of the Great Pyramid we have

-L to obtain from its King's Chamber coffer also but,
;
as before intimated, by the introduction of an addi-

tional and more difficult idea than mere cubic space ;
and this idea is, the mêan density of the whole earth.
Were masses of such matter directly procurable, the
best representation of the Pyramid weight standard
might have been a rectangular block of that substance,
57 times smaller than the coffer's internal capacity, set
up beside it and rarely much
in the equal temperature
disturbed atmospherical pressure of the same chamber.
But as we are not able, in spite of all the wonderful
resources of modem science, to delve anything like
deep enough to obtain a specimen of this grand unit
material which forms the foundation of our globe, we
must take the coffer's contents in water as a stepping-
stone, but only as that, to reach our desired result.
Thus the coffer's contents of pure water are 71,250
cubic Pyramid inches, which at the temperature of 68°
Fahr. would weigh 18,030,100 of our avoirdupois grains ;
according to the estimate of the British Government

that one cubic British inch of distilled water at tempera-
ture 62" Fahr.and barometer 30-00 inches, weighs
25 2 458 grains the necessary reduction being per-
;
formed for the different size of the inch and the altered
A
temperature. Therefore a mass of the earth's mean

density material of the size of 12,500 * Pyramid cubic
inches, at the standard Pyramid temperature and
pressure, weighs in the lump 18,030,100 British avoir-
dupois grains.
But what are its subdivisions on the Pyramid system ?
Here we can follow no better plan than that adopted in
the capacity ,branch of metrology and then we are
;
rewarded by finding, when we come to the most charac-

teristic division of all, viz., that of 50x50, which
should give us a popular unit to compare with the
pint in capacity —
we find, I say, that it does give us
something which is excessively close to the old Saxon
pound but with this further advantage, of world-wide
;
application in the Pyramid system, and presently to be

illustrated in computing weight from measured size, viz.,
that each such Pyramid pound is equal to the weight of
Pyramid inches of the earth's mean density.
five cubic
Hence our first Pyramid weight table runs thus :
Pyramid Weight Measure.

Chap. XIIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 233
Having already stated that the Pyramid grand weight

standard weighs in British terms, viz., avoirdupois
measure, 18,030,100 British grains; we are met, as
soon as we begin to compare Pyramid and British
weights together in point of fact, with an accusation,
that the Pyramid grains must be very 'small, if there
are 25,000,000 of them, to 18,000,000 nearly of the
British.
But herein comes to light one of those needlfess
pieces ofmeddling legislation by our most modern, or
Georgian era, political rulers, which so provoked John
Quincy Adams and other American writers on Saxon
metrology ; whereas the old law of the land was,
for
that the troy pouud should be divided
into 7,680
grains (and which were very nearly the weight of full
and fair grains of well-grown wheat), a later law said
that it should be divided into only 5,760 parts or
grains so called, but of no known variety of plant em-
ployed for breadstuff. Wherefore Cocker, Wingate, and
other arithmeticians of that day used to enter in their
useful compendiums during the transition period, that
32 real grains or 24 artificial grains made the penny-
weight troy and when that ingenious story was
;
pretty well indoctrinated into their obedient scholars,

the notice of the old grains was dropped out altogether,
and the new ones remained masters of the situation,
with the word "artificial" removed, and as though
there had never been any other.
Referred then now, over the heads of these, to the
genuine old grains of Saxon metrology (so far as we can
trace them back by the usual literary and historical
steps, and which is, after all, not so much as a thousand
number of 25,000,000 of the Pyramid grains
years), the
would have been measured then by 24,040,100 of the
Saxon grains of that earlier, though not Pyramid
epoch, day but a sufficiently close approach to the
;
25,000,000, to satisfy any poor man seeking the value

of a few grains only.
But the British weight measure of modern
legal
and historical times and above this item,
has, over
always been, even within itself and at home, in a
dire antagonism between two grand and rival systems ;
viz., troy and avoirdupois, not to say anything of

apothecaries' weight, which is little but the troy,
under a different mode of subdivision. General public
favour seems at last to have settled upon avoir-
dupois, as most worthy to be the national weight in
future for things in general, and especially things
on a large but as it does not go lower than
scale ;
drachms, why then, even though troy weight should be

extinguished to-morrow, apothecary's weight will have
still to be kept up for dealing with smaller quantities
than drachms and the more valuable class of substances.

There is, indeed, a legal definition of the number of
the large modern " artificial grains " which constitute a
pound avoirdupois, viz., 7,000 but as the further
;
avoirdupois subdivisions are into 16 ounces, and these

into 1 6 drachms, we are left there with one such drachm
equal to the crushingly awkward quantity to deal with
in accounts of 27*34375 grains and drachms are just
;
the point where science begins to be particular.

Therefore it is that druggists, obliged already to buy
wholesale by avoirdupois, have then to dispense retail
by troy or apothecary's weight for these last are the
;
only British weights which enable them to deal easily

with grains and yet these are not real grains, neither
;
for the people, nor in history, nor in science.

The Pyramid weights, therefore, which are on one
system only, and go through the whole scale from tons
to grains without any break, seem to offer already at
this point, an honourable mode of escape to the British
nation out of the confusion they have suffered for ages.
Chap, xm.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 235
No new names are required, many close approaches to

the grander standards and units will be remarked, and
the proportions of matter under each denomination, as
used in the Pyramid and in British nomenclature, are
approximately as follows :
Pyramid and British Weight Measures,

Compared through the temporary medium of English " artificial " grains.
( 1 grain real," or old

1 grain Pyramid 0.7212 \ Saxon 0-75000
\ 1 grain new English 1-00000
» 1 drachm avoird. 27-34375
1 drachm Pyramid 72-12
1 drachm apoth. 60-00000
\
1 oz. avoird. 437-5

1 OTince Pyramid 721-20 i
1 oz, troy or apoth. 480-0
{
f1 pound avoird. 1 ,000-

1 pound, an ancient
weight preserved at
=
I
1 pound PjTamid 7,212- the Exchequer, but >= 7,1

I
of unknown origin
I
1 pound old English
I,
and Scotch ,600*
( 1 stone meat 56,,000-
1 stone Pyramid 72,120-
1 stone wool ,000-
1 cwt. Pyramid 721,200*
I
1 cwt. avoird. = 784.,000-

1 wey Pyramid 1,803,010- 1 wey English = 1,274;,000-
ton Pyramid
( 1 ton avoird. = 15,680, 000-
1 18,030,100-
( 1 ton shipping = 18,816,,000-
Sjpecijic Gravity.
In no part of metrology more than in weight, is

there found so much of the wheel within wheel of
natural difficulty, tending, unless well watched and
studied, to introduce perverse variations whenever uni-
formity is attempted and there are still existing some
;
supporters of the arguments for keeping up both the

troy and avoirdupois weight systems amongst us. For
the same reasons, too, that those gentlemen believe the
complication was first introduced.
And what reasons were they ?
When society was in a very primitive, or much more
probably, a mediaeval degraded, condition, and little but
grain was sold, a test for the amount of grain in any par-
ticular vessel was, the quantity of water it would hold.
But water and grain are of different specific gravities
therefore, if equal bulks were taken, the purchaser got a
236 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt III.
very different quantity of what he valued most, than if

equal weights were observed and as some parties were
;
more particular about bulks than weights, and vice-versa,

two sets of weights were prepared, with such an amount
of difference between them, that a pound of grain in one,
occupied the same space as a pound of water in the
other.
But in the present day, when all sorts of matters
besides bare grain are sold, and almost every one of the
thousand and more substances dealt in has a different
specific gravity,we cannot hope to have as many dif-
ferent systems of weight as there are of such sub-
stances nor, maintaining only one system of capacity
;
measure, to keep up on all possible occasions that

appearance of identity between weight and bulk. Hence,
for the modern man, the only resource seems to be, to
have one capacity, and one weight, measure pure and
simple but to produce the identity required of old for
;
different substances, by calculation. Assisting that

calculation, too, by some convenient table of specific
gravities, wherein the point of coincidence between the
two descriptions of measure, or the point where there
is no calculation at all from bulks to find weights, shall
be in favour of the substance most frequently required

to be dealt with or for those which offer the best
;
average example of all the substances which have in

their turn to be either weighed or measured by man.
In the French metric system this point of coincidence
is occupied by water ; and it is intended that the cubic
amount of water being measured, that statement shall

in itself, with the mere alteration of names, and perhaps
of the decimal point, express its weight. Hence, at
a recent metrological discussion at the Philosophical
Society of Glasgow, a pro-French metrical speaker lauded
this quality of his favourite anti-national system and ;
enlarged upon how convenient it must be for a mer-

Chap.XIIL] the great pyramid. zyi
chant receiving goods in the docks, out of many vessels

from many countries, to go about among the packages
with a mere French metre measuring-rod in his hand ;
and by that obtaining their cubic bulks, thence to

know simultaneously their weights also.
" Yes," remarked another speaker, " that would be
simple enough if British merchants imported, and ex-
ported, and dealt in, nothing but water!'
Now the pro-French metrical man on this occasion
was a large dealer in iron and had made much fame
;
for himself, and some money too, by improved methods

of working the weighty iron plates required for modern
armour-clad war vessels. So he was completely over-
thrown by the above answer but tried to recover himself
;
and his theory with the professional remark, "Well, but

you must allow that the French metrical system is an
excellent one for ship-builders computing their displace-
ments by."
" Yes," again answered his merciless opponent, " if
ship-builders are never required to deal with salt water ;
only distilled water ; and can keep that always at the

uncomfortably cold temperature of water s maximum
density, and can also, work in a vacuum as to atmo-
spheric air;" for all these are the truly anti-practical
plans for any correct weighing to be performed on the
boasted French metrical system.
Other speakers then came to the defence of the pro-
French metrical iron ship-builder, and urged that a table
of specific gravities might be employed when anything
else than pure distilled water at a temperature of 39°
Fahr. was being measured or weighed and that when;
rough commercial results only were required, both

temperature and atmospheric pressure might povhahly
be neglected.
Let us look each of these sides of the argument
straight in the face for they serve well to contrast
;
essential and inlierent qualities in the French metrical,

as against the Pyramid, system of weighing.
The former, having its specific-gravity equality-point
at water, while almost all the substances dealt with by
art and science (especially the more useful and valuable
ones in modern such as the metals, minerals, &c.),
life,
are heavier, far heavier, than water, —

the weights first
given out by the French metre rod are always largely in
error.
The latter or Pyramid system, on the contrary,
having its equality-point at the earth's mean density,
or between stones and metals, is much nearer the truth
at once and without any specific gravity correction, for
things in general, and for precious ones in particular.
Again, the French system which makes the tempera-
ture reference close to freezing, or where men can barely
exist (and certainly cannot work to advantage), and the
atmospheric pressure reference, a vacuum where they
cannot exist at all, —
must require much larger correc-
tions on the rough measures actually taken in the cir-
cumstances of daily life, —
than the analogous Pyramid
references which are those of the average temperature
;
and average pressure under which all men upon this

earth, do live, move, and work.
Under the French system, indeed, a shopkeeper
ought to take account in summer of the large amount
of natural expansion of his goods above the ideal
temperature of water s maximum density, the wintry
39° Fahr. ;and in winter he ought to correct for the
artificial temperature which he keeps up by stoves or
otherwise. While in both summer and winter he ought

to make allowance for the buoyant power of air of the
density, more or less, of 30 inches pressure of mercury,
on the comparative specific gravities of the material of
and the material of the things weighed
his weights, ;
they being true according to his system only in an

Chap. XIIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 239
absolute vacuum, and that, too, in close proximity to

an ice-house.
But under the Pyramid system, and under the
British also, the ordinary weighings in the shop under
the temperatures and pressures there usually ex-
perienced, either in winter or summer, will be never
more than microscopically different from weighings per-
formed under the exact and scientific temperature and
pressure references of these systems ; viz., the mean,
very nearly, of what are experienced both in the shops
and the general habitations of men, all the wide world
over. But of this more and further in Chap. XY.y
Weights, then, on the Pyramid system are equally

referable, as with the French system, to one given point
on both the temperature and pressure scales, w^hen
nicety is required. But that given point in the Pyra-
mid case is an and a better known
easier, pleasanter,
one ; while for rough work of the world, the

the
Pyramid weights are calculable at once from Pyramid
linear measure, without any reference to observations
of thermometer and barometer at the instant, much
more accurately than the French from theirs, under
similar circumstances. The Pyramid rules, too, being
expressible in the following simple manner :
For small things, ascertain their bulk in cubic inches,

divide by 5, and the result is the weight in Pyramid
—
pounds if the said articles are of the same specific
gravity as the earth's average material.
For large masses, ascertain their bulk in cubic
Pyramid cubits, add \, and the result is the weight in
—
Pyramid tons^ under the same condition of specific
gravity.*
* Conversely, the Pyramid weight of a hody of earth's moan density

being given, to find its Pyramid cubical measure— multiply the pounds
weight by 5, and it will give the number of cubical inchea and decrease
:
the tons weight by |, to find the number of cubic cubits.

But if the matter measured in either case were not

of earth's mean density, but, say, ordinary stone, the
real weight would be nearer a
half, and if of the
more common metals, double, the amount given by
the above process the raw number first procured by
;
it, requiring in the case of every different physical sub-

stance, to be multiplied by its specific gravity in terms
of that of the earth's. Hence, such tabular multiplier is
1 when the specific gravity is the same as that of the
earth ; a fraction of 1 when lighter and 1 with some-
;
thing added to it, when heavier as in the following

;
table, prepared from various authorities :
Specific Gravities.
Earth's mean density =

1 Temperature
; =
68" Fabr.
Barometric Pressure :^ 30^025 British inches.
Cork ....
Chap. XIII.] THE
242 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part HI.
1 to 10 ^^* A commensurability, too, whicli may be

considered to have been intended ; for had the building
not been chiefly composed of a stone so much lighter
than what is usually known as ''
common stone," that
ithas the specific gravity of 0'412 in place of 0'442,
the even proportion would not have been obtained,
without indeed altering the size, and that would have
overthrown other equally, or still more, important com-
mensurabilities. But now, without in the slightest
degree interfering with any of its other departments of
science and cosmical reference, the Great Pyramid asserts
its unexceptionable fitness to be a centre of authority
and reference for weight measure also, and to all men,
of all nations, living on the whole earth.
International Appendix to Great Pyramid Weight Measure.

Sereditary Found Weight Measures.
Country or City.
chap.xiil] the great pyramid. 243
Intbrnational Appendix [continued).
Country or City.
CHAPTER XIV.
LINEAR AND SUPERFICIAL MEASURE.
WE have now arrived at the commercial arrangement

most important of all the measures of a
of the
nation at that one which requires practically to be
;
attended to first, and which was first attended to, and

secured with more than sufficient accuracy, as well
as with the grandest of suitable and harmonious earth-
commensurability in the Great Pyramid viz., linear, ;
or length, measure.
The unit of this measure, at the Pyramid, is the inch ;
accurately the 5ou,oio.ow th of the earth's axis of rotation ;
approximately, a thumb-breadth, to any man who has

ever lived on the earth during the last four thousand
years. In that long interval of anthropological time,
what mighty empires, what varied races of men. and
what languages too, have passed away from the face
of the world Therefore, of the present words and
!
phrases, laws and customs, which rule in modern

society, whether scientific, political or commercial,
which of them can expect to continue to control the
actions of men for anything like a similar period to
this rule of the inch ; or for the next forty centuries of
years ?
A thumb-breadth, then, is no indifferent test-refer-

ence to every poor man, for realising when in haste the
unit of his measure of length ; and keeping up some
Chap. XIV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 245
identity in his works, with those of his fathers from

earhest history, and even before history. Wherefore it
is only characteristic of the working men of Newcastle,

according to the unintended testimony oi Sir William
Armstrong before the British Association of 1863, .that
they have once more practically by their deeds and in
their works, pronounced indubitably for the inch (an
inch, too, decimally divided), wherever extreme accuracy
is concerned.
was so in our national olden times as well viz.,
It ;.
that the English unit was the inch, and not any of
those larger measures, of yards or metres, which the
wealthy have been endeavouring to get established of
late.
The old Exchequer standards, spoken of in 1742,

marked E for Queen Elizabeth, and supposed to date
from 1580, were, as reported at the time, one a yard,
and one an ell but that did not make either the one,
;
or the other, the unit of the country. Where the unit

is small, the public standard must inevitably consist of
a number of such units strung together ; and the
incommensurability, except through their component
inches, of that pair of measures laid side by side, the
yard and the ell, might have reminded men in sub-
sequent times of the true state of the case. But no,
the rich men and the lawyers were in power so the ;
unit of the country during the last century and until —

Sir John Herschel ten years ago began to advocate
the national, hereditary, and scientific claims as well, of
the inch —has been endeavoured to be proclaimed, the
huge, and unscientific,or not earth-commensurable,
(][uantity of, a yard.
That the efforts of the ruling classes have long been
really directed to this end ; and that in making so
much, as they have during late years been doing, of the
yard, they have intended it as in itself a new unit, and
not as a convenient number of the ancient small inch

units arranged together to suit a special purpose of
commerce, the following words of the act (June 1824)
sufficiently testify.
".The straight line or distance between the centres
of the two points in the gold studs in the straight brass
rod, now in the custody of the clerk* of the House of
Commons, whereon the words and figures standard yard
<)/ 1760 are engraved, shall be, and the same is hereby
declared to be, the original and genuine standard of that

measure or lineal extension called a yard and that the ;
same straight line or distance between the said two

points in the said gold studs in the said brass rod, the
brass being at the temperature of 62° Fahrenheit's
thermometer, shall be, and is hereby denominated, the
imperial standard yard, and and is hereby de-
shall be,
clared to be, the unit, or only standard measure of
extension."
Yet a yard-unit comes, even on the rich people of
the country, rather awkwardly ; or they are striving at
something still greater Astronomical Society's
; for the
new 1835, as well as of those of Troughton, Sir
scale of
George Shuckburgh, and others, were oftener of five
feet than three. At three, however, it has been even-
tually settled by the last Parliamentary commission,*
and at three feet it will legally remain until some great
constitutional exertion be made to rectify it.
During all the time, too, that it has remained there,
* The commission of 1838 had been thorough enough to consider all
the following points :
A, Basis, arbitrary or natural, of the system of standards.

B, Construction of primary standards.
C, Means of restoring the standards.
D, Expediency of preserving one measure, &c., unaltered.
E, Change of scale of weights and measirres.
r, Alteration of the land-chain and the mile.
G, Abolition of Troy weight.
H, Introduction of decimal scale.
I, Assimilation to the scale of other countries, &c.
Chap.XTY.] the great pyramid. 247
a mostartificial and naturally incommensurable quantity
with anything grand, noble, sublime, there never—

seemed to be the slightest suspicion, until John Taylor
announced it from his Great Pyramid studies, and Sir
John Herschel followed with scientific confirmations,
that each of the 36 inches of which the modern British
Government's unit and standard yard is composed,
contains within itself all that much desiderated physical
applicability and scientific perfection, —
when each single
British inch is, almost exactly, the 1-5 00, 00 0,0 00th of
( the earth's axis of rotation already referred to.
Almost, only, not quite, at this present time for it ;
requires I'OOl of amodern British inch to make one

such true inch of the earth and the Great Pyramid.
An extraordinarily close approach, even there, between
two measures of length in different ages and different
lands ;and yet if any one should doubt whether our
British inch can really be so close to the ancient
and earth-perfect measure, I can only advise him to
look to the original documents, and see how narrowly
it escaped being much closer and would have been
;
so too in these days, but that the Government officials

somewhere in the "unheroic" eighteenth century allowed
the ell-measure, of equal date and authority with the
yard, and of a greater number of inches (45 to 36), and
therefore, in so far, a more powerful standard, to drop —
out of sight.
The modern inch now in vogue amongst us, was
derived from the Exchequer yard-standard, through
means of Bird's copy in 1760 and other copies, and
was therefore intended to be one of the inches of that
particular yard but the inches of the Exchequer ell
;
were rather larger inches, and there were more of them ;
so that if either standard was rightfully taken as the

sole authority for the value of an inch, it should have
been the ell. Now when these standards were very

accurately compared by Graham in 1743, before a large
deputation of the Royal Society and the Government,*
it was found that the Exchequer ell's 45 inches
exceeded the quantity of 45 such inches as the Ex-
chequer yard contained 36 of, by the space of 0-0494
of an inch. A result, too, which was in the main con-
firmed by the simultaneous measures of another
standard ell at Guildhall, with an excess of 0*0444 of
an inch, and the Guildhall yard with the excess of
0*0434 of an inch.
Keeping, however, only to the Exchequer standard
ell and finding that it was not, after all, the Exchequer
;
yard, which was subsequently made (in Bird's copy)

the legal standard of the country, that it was compared
with, but a previous copy of it, and found in 1743
to be in excess by 0*0075 f of an inch, on the Royal
Society's scale, —
we must subtract this quantity from
the observed excess of the Exchequer ell and then we ;
get that its 45 inches were equal in terms of the

present standard inches of the country, to 45*0419.
But 45 Pyramid inches are equal to 45*045 modern
English inches whence it will be seen, that a Pyramid
;
inch and an early English inch had a closeness to each

other that almost surpasses belief, or of 1* to 0*99993 :
and every well-wisher of his country to see,

will cause
that the inch must be preserved. Not only preserved
too, but, if possible, restored to its ancient, or Pyramid
value ; —when the following table of earth-commensur-
able lengths (in its now proposed divisions, chosen
because appropriate to the Great Pyramid's numbers
* Astronomical Society's Memoirs, vol. ix.

t This is the quantity, or about it, by which' the Royal Society's scale
and those descended from it exceed the Exchequer yard, by what Mr.
Baily calls "a very large quantity;" but he went to eight places of
decimals of an inch in his measure, and he does not seem, unfortunately,
to have looked at the Exchequer ell at all.
as well as suitable to human use and wont), would

become possible to be the British measures in modem
times also, and without dislocation to any of the more
usual popular factors.
The first remark to be expressed on this table, is the

very close approach of the acre-side of the Pyramid to
that of the British scale. It is a length which does not
nominally on the usual linear English lists,
figure
though through the square measure and is,
it exists ;
without doubt, the most important large measure by

far which the whole community possesses because it ;
is the invariable term in which all the landed property
of the country is bought, sold, and " deeded."

As such an all-important quantity to this country, one
cannot at all understand how an acre was ever established
by Government at such a very awkward proportion in
the length of its side, to any of our linear measures ;
for the fraction which it gives, is rough to a degree and :
yet, it will be observed, that the Pyramid principle,

hardly altering the real value to any sensible extent,
makes it, in its own inches, at once the easy quantity of
2,500 or in arm, i.e. cubit, lengths, 100.
;
Nor does the advantage of the Pyramid principle end

here, for the mile contains 2,500, or 50
x 50, cubit-
lengths and such a proportion has recently become so
;
great a favourite with Government, that they have com-

menced a magnificent survey of Great Britain on pre-
cisely this proportion, or 1-2 5 00th of nature.
This is by far a larger scale than either our own, or
any other, country has ever been completely surveyed
on yet and infers such an infinity of drawing, copying,
;
and engraving, that it could positively never have been

thought of, even in wealthy Great Britain, but for the
previous invention, first of photography to do all the
copying, and then of electrotypy to multiply the soft
engraved copper Hence the survey on the scale
plates.
of 1-2 5 00th is work of the present
a remarkable public
time, and excites some curiosity to know how and why
that proportion came to be adopted.
Chap. XIV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 251
Plainly1-2500 does not form any portion of the

British imperial linear system and when we are officially
;
told, that the proportion was adopted to allow of the

map being on a scale of 25 inches to a mile, or
becoming thereby capable of representing an acre by
one square inch, —
we are quite assured (if the Govern-
ment is still true to the legal measures of the land),
that that is not the reason for the map is not on
;
that scale. It is truly of the proportion of 1-2 5 00th

of nature,; but that gives in the British metrolog}^,
25 "344 inches to a mile, and 1"018 inches to an acre.
Immense inconvenience, therefore, results to th^
component members of the British nation, that the
grandest and most costly survey of their country which
they have ever paid for, and which is now in inevitable
progress whether they like it or no, does not fit in to—
their existing measures evenly, but carries these annoy-
ing fractions along with it.
Yet a single act of parliament adopting the Pyramid

measures for the country, —
or, we might almost say,
restoring the nation's hereditary measures to their

proper place, —would cause the map, without any altera-
tions to it, to be at once a map on the scale of 25 legal
British inches to the mile, and of one square legal
British inch to the acre, without the smallest fraction
left over or under and would substitute truth for
;
falsehood, on every occasion when a Briton has hastily

to mention the great national map of his country.
In my first edition, I said that Britons might in hot

haste stumble into that slovenly and untruthful error of
speaking of 25-344 inches, as being 25'000 inches but ;
I regret to have to add now, that larger experience shows

that they commit themselves equally in their calmer mo-
ments as well for in the Proceedings of the Royal So-
;
ciety of Edinburgh for the Session 1872-3, just published,

the learned President Professor, Sir Robert Christison,

Bart, M.D. (and great for the introduction of the French
metrical system, as well as for more accurate or con-
venient weights and measures for British pharmacy and
chemistry), one therefore who knows what exactness is,
yet even he, from his presidential chair and in his in-
augural address for the season, could continually speak
of, and the Society subsidized by Government, could
continually print on page after page, ''the 2 5 -inch

maps Ordnance Survey
of the ;" just as though those
25-344-inch Ordnance maps really and truly were on
tât other scale, in the existing inches of the present
law of the land as well as in the inches of the ancient
Great Pyramid, in favour of which the very popular
President made then no mention.
International Appendix to Great Pyramid Linear Measure.
Hereditary Cubit or " Cloth" Measures.
Country or City.
Chap. XIV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 2>S3
International Appendix {continmd).
Country or City.
254 0^^ INHERITANCE IN [Part III.
Toot Measures.
As shown in our table on page 249, and its subsequent explication, a

12-inch, foot standard introduces notable difficulties into the earth-com-
mensurable section of the Great Pyramid arrangement of long measure.
And proposals have been before the public for several years, from totally
opposite quarters too, requesting Government to enact a 10-inch foot for
the future use of the nation.
Such a foot would evidently harmonise at once with every branch of
the Pyramid system ; but how would it suit the convenience of the
working men, for whose purpose mainly the foot seems to have been
originally introduced, and is still kept up ?
"We have already seen in the note on page 27, Chapter III., that the
natural or naked foot of man is barely lO'o inches long, though the shoed
and booted foot of civilized man may be twelve inches or more and ;
indeed, in some parts of Switzerland and Germany, their local metrological

tables state that twelve inches make, not a foot, but a " schuh " or shoe.
There need be no surprise, therefore, to find, that two separate foot mea-
sures have long been known amongst mankind, oneof them averaging twelve
English inches long, and the other ten, though still almost invariably
divided into twelve parts, or small inches of its own in the foot of the
:
one case, its length was twelve thumb breadths, and in the other, twelve
finger breadths, approximately. The ancient Roman foot {11-62 English
inches long nearly) was evidently of the former class as was likewise the
;
Greek Olympic foot, generally known as the Greek foot J3ar excellence, and
= 1211 English inches; though Greece had also another foot standard,
termed the Pythic foot, which was only 9*75 English inches long.
But in mediaeval and modern, or Saxon, Norman, and British times,
humanity seems to have declared ifself unmistakeably for the larger foot.
So that in Dr. Kelly's list of all the commercial peoples known to Great
Britain in 1821 (see his Universal Cambist, vol. ii., p. 244), while ten of
them have feet ranging between 9*50 and 10-99 English inches, no less
than seventy-four are found to have feet whose lengths are comprised
somewhere between 11-0 and 13-0 of the same inches.
Hence, if any alterations should be made in future time to earth-com-
mensurate the Pyramid foot, as now imagined =: 12-012 English inches,
it should rather be in the direction of making it =12'5, than 10-0,
Pyramid inches and no harm would be done in either case, so long as the
;
value of the inch was not interfered with.

The ancient idolatrous Egyptians of the Pharaonic period do not appear
to have had any foot measure ; but, for all linear purposes, to have
invariably used their well-known profane cubit = 20-7 English inches
long; doubling it sometimes as the royal or Karnak cubit, which was
then =:: 41-4 English inches. In subsequent Greek Alexandrian times,
those Kgyptians both employed, perverted, and mixed up with their own,
sundry measures of Greece, and may then have had feet, as well as small
cubits= 1-5 foot; but these hybrid and short-lived standards are by no
means worth our while now to enquire into, for Alexandria of the
Ptolemies, never very ancient, has long since been deservedly dead and
buried; while the present Alexandria is a diffeient city, inhabited by a
differently descended people, and professing a totally different religion.
Hereditary Inch Measures.
CouBtry or Cit^
256 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt III.
The above table is prepared chiefly from Dr. Kelly's Universal Cambist;
but inasmuch as he does not descend below foot measures, and the inches
are then deduced by dividing his values for the feet by twelve ;
—
the list
is supplemented by positive inches, or their verbal equivalents, as —
zoll,
pouce, tomme, turn, pollegada, pulgada, &c., as contained in Weale's
Woolhouse's "Weights and Measures."
Chap. XV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 257
CHAPTER XY.
HEAT AND PRESSURE, ANGLE, MONEY, TIME.

V
A S already shown, no system of weights and measures

-^ can be complete Avithout a reference to heat, and
its power of altering the dimensions of all bodies. It
would appear too, that, next to the very existence of
matter, heat is the most important influence or condi-
tion in creation and, since the rise of the modern
;
science of thermo-dynamics, which looks on heat as a

form of motion, the measure of heat is the first step
from statics to dynamics, which is the last and truest
form of all science.
A " thermometer " is therefore one of the most widely
and there is pro-
essential of all scientific instruments,
bably no modem which can advance far without
science
its aid unless indeed assisted by some semi-natural
;
method of securing one constant reference temperature,

for all its observations but which is seldom the case
;
in modern observatories. Yet the thermometer in Eng-

land, though there so doubly necessary, has been
allowed to remain in a most unsatisfactory guise. That
is, its scale is generally ridiculed over all continental
Europe, as being both inconvenient in practice, and
founded in error, in so far as the notion of that worthy
man. Mynheer Fahrenheit, touching absolute cold, is
seen every winter to be a mistake, whenever his ther-
mometer descends below its carefully-marked zero ;
s
2s8 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part III.
while the all-important point of the freezing of water

is left at the not very signal, but certainly rather
inconvenient, number of 32°; and the boiling-point at

the not more convenient one of 212^
Many, therefore, have been the demands that we
should adopt either the German Reaumur, or the French
centigrade, i.e., originally the thermometer of Celsius ;
in terms of any of which, water freezing marks 0° ; and

all degrees below that notable point, are negative ;
above, positive.
The proposed changehas, except in a few chemical
circles,been strenuously resisted, because
1st. The anomalous absolute numbers chosen for
freezing and boiling on Fahrenheit's scale, do not inter-
fere with the accuracy of thermometers so marked, when
due allowance is made for them.
2nd. It has been against the principle of most British
scientific men and
hitherto, in their different weights
measures, to have them showing a natural standard in
themselves ; ût only to have their proportion to the
said natural numerically determined, and
standards
then recorded in writing elsewhere.
3rd. This system has been carried out in its integrity
in Fahrenheit's thermometer when it is written, that
180 even subdivisions shall exist between freezing and
boiling and the commencing number for freezing shall
;
be 32°.
4th. In the fact that the distance between freezing
and boiling is divided into 180 parts in Fahrenheit's
thermometer, but only 100 in the French thermometer
and 80 in the German instrument, eminent advantage
is claimed for every-day purposes even among the
;
chemists too, as weU as all other members of the com-

munity, —
^because a greater number of different states
of temperature can be quoted in even degrees without
reference to fractions of a degree ; and
Chap. XV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 259
5th. It is said that the proposed change would be

subversive of all ordinary ideas of steady-going indi-
viduals as towhat the new numbers really meant
because, what honest country gentleman would appre-
ciate in his heart that a temperature of 40°, when a
French system should be established amongst us, meant
a summer heat of 104° Fahrenheit ?
Some of these objections have weight, but others are
of doubtful importance and in all that can be said
;
about the British scientific principle (as established by

government) not founding its measures on natural
standards direct, —
that has not only been well-nigh dis-
establishedby the recent outcry of many noisy mem-
bers of the commercial, and chemical, parts of the
nation for the modern scientifically devised French
units ; but is proved to be baseless for our nation's
early, and more than historic, origin ; by reason of
the real British length-unit, having been
the inch,
found, after all, to be an even round fraction of the
earth's semi-axis of rotation.
The ultra-scientific and most highly educated up-
holders too of Fahrenheit, have, in the instance of the
best practical zero of temperature, received a notable
correction from the poorer classes of our land ; the very
classes for whom working measures should be
alone all
primarily arranged for every gardener, and probably

;
every ploughman who thinks of such things at all, is

accustomed in his daily toil to speak of the more rurally
important and biologically trying cases of temperature,
not in terms of Fahrenheit's scale by any means, but as
so many ''
degrees of frost " or '*
heat."
The practical importance, therefore, of having the
British thermometrical zero at the freezing-point of
water, is thus incontestably proved, and from the
right quarter ; while, if it be desirable, as no doubt
it is desirable, to have the space from freezing to
26o OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part III.
boiling divided into a greaternumber of degrees

than either the French or German systems offer,
why then, let the nation take for the space be-
tween the two even the 180
natural water units, not
of the honest Dutchman, Fahrenheit, but the 250 of
the Great Pyramid scale for by so doing, not only will
;
they reap that one advantage above-mentioned to a still

greater extent but they will suffer less shock, as it
;
were, in their feelings, when talking of summer tem-

peratures, than even if they retained the size of the
Fahrenheit degrees, but placed the at freezing as ;
simply illustrated by the following numbers, giving the

same absolute temperatures in terms of five different
thermometric scales :
Fahrenheit.
of several nations would place the melting-point of the

most dense and refractory of all metals, platinum. Or
descend again to —
400° Pyramid, and we find a point
regarded by some existing chemists as the absolute
zero of temperature though natural philosophers are
:
more inclined to prefer their theoretical base of the air

thermometer at —
682° Pyramid but as none of them ;
have yet approached nearer than about half-way thereto,

no man among them knows what physical obstacles
may lie in the untried portion of their patji. And
there may not improbably be many.
Thus the French metrical temperature reference was

originally intended by its exceedingly scientific authors,
admirable for their day, to have been the freezing-point
of water on the arithmetical and mathematical, rather
;
than physical and experimental, conclusion that they —

would find water in its densest condition when coldest,
or immediately before passing into the state of ice. .
But lo when they began to experiment, nature refused

!
to be bound by human ideas, and water was discovered

to be of the greatest density at a very sensible distance
of heat above freezing, or at 3 9°' 2 Fahrenheit.
When this discovery was once made, able men found
in it a most beneficent infiuence to promote the ameni-
ties of human life upon the surface of the earth ; seeing
that but for the anomalous expansion of water with cold,
when the temperature descends below 3 9° 2 Fahr., our
lakes and rivers would freeze at the bottom instead of
the top and would, in fact, accumulate beds of ice below,
;
until in the winter they became entirely solid blocks

which blocks no summer sun would be able to do more
than melt a small portion of the surface of, to be inevi-
tably frozen hard again the next cold night, to the
destruction of all the fish.
The discovered fact, however, of what really does

take place, when water approaches the freezing-point,

had the inconvenience of utterly breaking up the)
uniformity of the Academy's arrangements for tem-'
perature reference in the French metrical system. For
the Parisian philosophers still desired to refer some
observations to freezing ;
yet could not but con-
scientiously admit the superior propriety, at least for
all measurements wherein the density of water entered,
of employing their newly-corrected temperature of
3 9°. 2 Fahr., rather than their former 32° Fahr.
Accordingly, at page 21 of " Eoscoe's Lessons in
Chemistry," where the best possible face put upon is
French measures for the British nation, we are told that

the French unit of weight is a cubic centimetre of water
at a temperature of 4° centigrade. But at page 147, a
table of specific gravities is given, where it is stated that
water at the temperature of 0° centigrade is to be
taken as unity. And no temperature reference at all
appears for length measure perhaps because the author
;
knew that that is just now, for the metre of the

Archives, an uncertain quantity somewhere between
6° and 12° C.
Again at pages 361 and 362 extensive tables are for-

mally given of comparisons between the English and
French measures of all kinds (descending, where weight
is concerned, to the sixth place of decimals of a grain),
but no mention at all is made either of temperature or
atmospheric pressure for any of them though the ;
former condition must vary occasionally by 60", and the

latter by the extent of the whole atmosphere.
In fact the too learnedly artificial and bungled cha-
racter of the French temperature and pressure references
is such, that they cannot, in practice, look the light of
day, much less that of science, in the face while they ;
are, above all things, and for other reasons as well,

totally unsuitable to the working man. You cannot.
for instance,attempt or pretend to use them in

practice, without breaking their most important pro-
visions continually as well as introducing huge errors,
;
such as the omission or introduction of the whole

atmosphere, and all for the purpose of guarding
against mere microscopic errors depending on minute
and almost totally insensible variations of the atmo-
sphere as it exists about us.
On this unhappy doctrinaire French system, strictly,
if there should arise a difference of opinion in society, or
at a market, as to which is the longer of two measuring-
rods, or which is the heavier of two weights, you must
carry both of them away from what they were being
employed for, and bring the rods down by any possible
method to the 6° or 1 2° C. point, and place the weights
by some difficult and expensive contrivance in a vacuum
at a temperature of 0° C, or perhaps 4° C. Both of these
being out-of-the-way conditions where no one wants to
use either rods or weights and where you may find that
;
their relations to each other (from different rates and

characters of heat expansibility) are actually and totally
different from what they were at any of the degrees of
natural temperature, which they were being really and
practically used in and which degrees never differ
;
much from their mean quantity all the year through.
Indeed the extreme narrowness of the range both of

temperature and atmospheric pressure, within which all
the best, and the most too, ofhuman work is performed,
—
and can only flourish, has begun at last to excite
intelligent and interested attention. Wherefore thus,
an able and scientific American author, Mr. Clarence
King, holds forth, in his recent book entitled " Moun-
taineering in Sierra Nevada," California, —
on pressure,
when he has descended to the inhabited plain country
from the high and snowy flanks of Mount Shasta :
" Tlie heavier air of this lower level soothed us into

a pleasant laziness (frame of mind) which lasted over
Sunday, resting our strained muscles and opening the
heart anew to human and sacred influence. If we are
sometimes at pain when realising within what narrow
range of latitude mankind reaches finer development, or —
how short a step it is, from tropical absence of spiritual
life, to dull boreal stupidity, —
it is added humiliation to
experience our still more marked limitation in altitude.

At fourteen thousand feet, or with 17 only, in place of
30, inches of atmospheric pressure, little is left me
but bodily appetite and impression of sense. The habit
of scientific observation, which in time becomes one of
the involuntary processes, goes on as do heart-beat and
breathing a certain general awe overshadows the mind
;
;
but on descending again to lowlands, one after another

the whole riches of the human organization come back
with delicious freshness."
By what insane impulse then could it have been, that
the philosophers of Paris did not accept their position
on the earth, under the atmosphere, as given them by
God and instead of thankfully making the delightful
;
mean annual temperature and wholesome mean annual

pressure of the atmosphere on and in their abodes, the
national references for those features in all matters of
their metrology, —they must rush off to a horribly chil-
ling and actually freezing zero to a theoretical absence
;
of all vital atmosphere and to a host of physical diffi-

;
culties which they have not even yet completely over-

come or got out of the maze of
Or by what mere flock- of-sheep impulse of irrationally
following, is it, that now our own scientific men, and the
meteorologists among them more particularly, having
made their own barometrical observations between 50°
and 90° in-doors, and having received others from
abroad also confined within the same limits of tem-
perature, can think of no other mode of bringing them

all to one common point of comparison, than by carry-
ing every one of them right away to the distant and
outside freezing-point ; and applying for that purpose
so ]^rge a correction to the numbers read off from each
barometer, that the original observer fails to recognise in
his computed observations those standard heights of
quicksilver which he used to identify in his daily experi-
ence with particular conditions of weather, or warnings
of approaching storms ?
But all these anomalies are so happily corrected by

the Great Pyramid system, that primeval Author
its
must surely have had more real regard for humanity,

than all the savants and doctrinaires of the first French
Revolution put together. For the mighty building of
old, being founded on the 30th parallel of latitude, is at
once in the approximate temperature and very approxi-
mate atmospheric pressure of the middle zone of either
hemisphere of the earth and as the iso-barals equally
;
with the iso-thermals, are much broader there, than in

any other latitude, —
that 30° zone represents the climatic
conditions of a larger part of the earth than any other
possible zone and being also the parallel which has in
;
either hemisphere an equal amount of surface between

it and the Pole on one side, and between it and the
Equator on the other, it cannot help being somewhere

very near to a golden mean between the far too hot
tropics, and the and antarctic circles
far too cold arctic
—
;
while at the same time

it receives more sunshine,
more vivifying influence to man than any other latitude,

by reason of its paucity of clouds, combined with the
high solar altitude. (See the Maps in my " Equal Sur-
face Projection.")
That paucity of clouds in latitude 30°. being largely
due to the trade-wind influence, is accompanied by a
barometric pressure which, in that latitude and at the

surface of the sea, reaches there its terrestrial onaximuTn,
rather than mean quantity ;
—
then come into play
^but
the elevation both of the King's Chamber in the Great
Pyramid, and of the Pyramid on its own hill-top, which
correct that small excess of pressure ; as likewise does
the same elevation fact, the rather too great tempera-
ture of Egypt generally, for the Pyramid Standard that ;
land being situated in one of the longitudes rather than

latitudes of extra development of warmth.*
But this total hypsometrical elevation of 4,297 inches
above the sea level, corrects the King's Chamber's level
of atmospheric mean temperature, to what, — in the scale
of natural temperatures ?
To the temperature firstly of one-fifth exactly from

freezing to boiling of water ; and secondly, to the mean
temperature of all the anthropological earth. The entire
earth has a surface temperature rather lower than one-
fifth ; but such entire earth includes Polar lands in
either hemisphere which are not, and cannot, and never
will be, permanently occupied by man. Lands too,
which with their long Arctic nights ignore the Pyramid's
very first and foundational teaching, or of solar days
numbering 365*242 to the length of the year.
There is therefore no more occasion for taking those
uninhabitable, and uninhabited, lands' temperatures
into account, when deciding on the one temperature to
which all living men shall refer their science, their
metrology, and their commerce, than for our most
learned meteorologists, working in pleasantly warmed
rooms, carrying all their barometric observations away
to 32° Fahr. actually; while our good friends the
Russians —
who know what cold is far too well to court
—
it unnecessarily ^reduce their barometric observations
* See my ** Treatise on Equal Surface Projection," 1870.

to 62° Fahr. ; a most praiseworthy approacli to the 68"

Fahr. of the Great Pyramid, but without any cosmical
reason in its special favour.
And on making such very proper Polar exception

in our earth-surface enquiry, the mean temperature
of all man-inhabited countries appears to be, the very
same beneficent and most suitable quantity as that
of the Great Pyramid whose system of numbers
;
enables us now to express its standard quantity

of i of temperature, by 50°;number or the very
already made out as specially belonging to the
King's Chamber itself, where temperature reference is
most required. Hence we are now Pyramidically justi-
fied in giving, in the general table on p. 268 (derived
as to its items from various modern sources expressed
in Fahrenheit and Centigrade), the numbers which
would be read phenomena, so important
off for those
for the progress of civilization and man, upon any well-
graduated Pyramid thermometer soon, it is hoped, to
be constructed.
Angle.
No sooner has man in the course of his scientific

development begun to contemplate the skies, than he
feels the necessity of having angular, as well as, or even
rather than, linear, measure to refer to for distances
and the same demand for angular measure is soon
afterwards experienced in each of the purely terrestrial
sciences as well.
Therefore it was, that the French savants of the
Revolution attempted to introduce into their decimally-
arranged metrical system an angular graduation where
the quadrant contained 100, and the whole circle 400,
degrees. But, after trying it for some years, they had
to give it up ; for the influence of " Great Babylon,"
Temperatures in Pyramid Thermometer Degrees.
Atmospheric Pressure = 30 inches, except when otherwise stated.

Number Phenomena.
Number
Phenomena. on Scale. on Scale.
Degrees.
Platinum melts . 5000 Wood spirit boils 166
Wrought iron melts . 4000 Potassium melts 158
»> >»
3750 Yellow wax melts 155
Steel melts 3500 Greatest observed shade ")
139
>» >?
3250 temperature . . j
Cast iron melts . 3875 Stearine melts . 138
„ grey, melts 3130 Spermaceti melts 122
„ white „ . 2625 Summer temperature at t
100
Grold, pure, melts 3125 Pyramid . . j
, alloyed as in coinage 2950 Ether, common, boils 92
Copper melts 2875 Blood heat 91-6
Silver, pure, melts 2555 Butter and lard melt 82
>> » >)
2500
Bronze melts 2250 Mean temperature at
Sulphur boils 1100 Pyramid temp.=T i
Antimony melts 1080 Mean temperature
Zinc melts 1028 both of alllands in- 50
» ?> • •
900 habited by man, and
Iron visible in the dark 1000 of the most suitable
Mercury boils . 882 degree to man • ;
875
Sulphuric acid, strong, boils 845 Ether boils 28
j> »> » 812 Mean temperature of ")
25
Lead melts 815 London . . )
Cadmium . . 788 Low winter temperature
20
Phosphorus boils 725 at Pyramid .
Bismuth m^lts . 575 Water freezes

Water boils under 20 atmo- Freezing mixture, snow "^
spheres
")
535
and
—50
. . . salt . . . j
It 15 ,,
>» 500 Sulphuric acid freezes —87
10 „ 450 Mercury freezes —98
_5> )> 5 ,, 381 Greatest Arctic cold ex-
-125
Spirits of turpentine boils 325 perienced
Acetic acid boils 290 Greatest artificial cold,
Sulphur melts . 278 nitrous oxide and car-
Water boils 250
-350
bonic disulphide, in
Sodium melts 238 vacuo
Benzol boils 200 Absolute zero (Miller's
Alcohol, pure, boils 198
-400
Chemistry)
j> » » 195 Theoretical base of air
Stearic acid melts 174 thermometer, or air occu- -682
White wax melts 170 pying no space at all
which had originally invented, and then fixed on the

world, our present sexagesimal sj^stem, or 360° to the
circle, and 60 minutes to the degree, was too powerful
for modern Paris to contend successfully against.
But there could have been no more community of
feeling or idea between most idolatrous Babylon and
the totally non-idolatrous Great Pyramid in their
goniometry, than in their methods of astronomical
orientation, which we have already seen were entirely
diverse. What system, then, for angle was employed
at the Great Pyramid ?
A system apparently of 1,000° to the circle ; 250° to

the quadrant.
This conclusion is deduced from the following features
at the Pyramid.
(1.) The angle of rise of the Pyramid's flanks, and
the angle of descent or ascent of its passages, are both
very peculiar angles, characteristic of the Great Pyra-
mid ; and though rough and incommensurable on either
the Babylonian, or French, or any known vulgar system,
are in a practical way evenly commensurable on the
Pyramid system.
Pyeamid Featuee.
chamber may be considered the chamber of angular

measure and does,'"* at its centre, view the whole
;
Pyramid side, at un angle of 75° 15' \" Babylonian,

but 209° "03 Pyramid. And though there are now
only 202, there are shown to have been in the original
finished Pyramid somewhere between 208 and 212
complete masonry courses or agreeing, within the limits
;
of error of those researches, with the angular result of

209°.
3. And then there follows a useful practical result
to Navigation, and its peculiar itinerary measure, the
" knot," or nautical, or sea, mile ; viz., the length of a
mean minute of a degree of latitude.
At present there is much inconvenience from the
large difference in length between our land and sea
miles ; for they measure 63,360* and 72,984* inches
respectively.
But, granted that a Pyramid knot shall be 1-2 5th
part of a —
Pyramid degree, then the respective lengths
of a Pyramid land and a Pyramid sea mile will be the
nearly approaching quantities, in inches, of 62,500* and
62,995*.
Money.
The French metrical system included "money ; and

its issued accordingly, have deluged the world
francs,
to such an extent, that when a prize was recently pro-
posed to all nations by the British sovereign, for a cer-
tain artistic manufacture to be competed for at the
South Kensington Museum of Science and Art, the
money value of that prize was publicly advertised in
" francs."
Wherefore many inquirers have demanded, "What
about money on the Pyramid system?"
* See my " Life and Work," vol. iii. p. 209.

Ican only answer them, that I have not been able

to find outanything about that subject in the Great
Pyramid.
But is that to be wondered at ? Only look at any
piece of money whatever whose image and superscrip-
:
tion does it bear ? That of some earthly Caesar or other.

Therefore is money of the earth, earthy ; i.e., in the
sense of dust and ashes, human corruption and speedy
passing away. But all the Great Pyramid measures
hitherto investigated, being evenly commensurable in
every case, either with the deep things of this planet
world, or the high things of heaven above, are to be
considered as impressed rather with a typical effigy of
some of the attributes of the creation of God and we ;
may find their purity, and almost eternity, presently

borne testimony to by a closer and more direct link of
connection still.
Tvme.
Time an admitted subject in every good system of

is
metrology and yet is it an absolute imponderable

; ;
one, too, of which, says the moralist, we take no

account but by its loss. And if this be true, how all-
;"
important for us to know *' how much there is of it
especially how much still remains, of that finite section
already told off by the Eternal, to witness the present
manner of dominion, perhaps trial, of men upon the
earth.
Just now
these questions are above unaided man's in-
tellect and though the metaphysicians, following up
:
their verbal disquisitions on the infinity of space, desire

to tnake out also an absolutely infinite extension of
time, and that both for time past and time to come,
the researches of the scientists are more to our purpose,
for they dwell rather upon the unlimited divisibility
272 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part ill.
of time. Divide it, for instance, into ever such minute

portions, and it is time still ; and not like thechemi-
cal elements of matter, which, after a certain amount
of subdivision, exhibit, to the mathematician, their com-
ponent molecules with totally different properties from
what are possessed by larger portions of the substances.
But whether time be long or short, and past, future,
or even present, the human senses, unassisted by
reference to the material world, are far more liable to
error in this, than in any other branch of all* metrology.
To some men, time slips away almost unheeded, unim-
proved, too, until the end of life itself comes while ;
with others, time is regarded as the most precious of all

the usable gifts to men. With time and plenty of it,
what splendid achievements may be realized and ;
into a short time, how much can be packed away. While

the involuntary action of our thinking system, even
exceeds the utmost straining of our voluntary efforts in
matters of time ; so that a single second between sleep-
ing and waking has enabled a man to pass, without de-
siring it, through the multitudinous experiences of a
long and eventful life.
On
one side, again, in the study of time, the Natural
History sciences give us the sober biological warning,
that man, as he exists now, in materially uninterfered-
with possession of the earth, is not going to last for
ever for there is a settled length of time for the whole
;
duration of a species, as well as the single life of an

individual therein. But on the other side, the too ex-
clusive study of certain of these very sciences has led
their out-and-out votaries, in late years, to talk more
flippantly of time than of anj^thing else under the
sun. A few hundred thousand millions of years ac-
cordingly are at one instant created, and at another
destroyed, or at another still totally disregarded by
some of these gentlemen, accordingly as their theories
of the hour prompt them and it is only the astronomer

:
who stands up in rigid loyalty to this real creation by

God alone, and tells mankind that time, is one only
that it is the chief tester of truth and error and even ;
down to its minutest subdivisions, it cannot be dis-

regarded. The same eclipse, for instance, of sun by
moon, as seen from the same cannot occur at two
place,
different times, only at one time and that one epoch
;
is capable of the sharpest definition, even down to a
fractional part of a second.

To astronomy therefore only, of the modern sciences,
can we reasonably look for some safe guidance in the
practical measuring of time.
In the broadest sense, be measured by

timfe is said to
the amount of movement some body moving at an
of
equable rate. And the most equable motion by far,
the only motion that has not sensibly varied within the
period of human history, is, I might almost say, the
favourite, and fundamental. Pyramid phenomenon of,
the rotation of the earth upon its axis.
Not that even ihit movement is absolutely uniform

through all possible time, in the eye of theory ;but
that, tested practically in the most rigid manner, or by
the determination of the length of a sidereal day, no
alterationhas been perceived either by practical or
physical astronomy during the last 2,300 years. The
next most equable movement, too, but of far longer
period, is a secular consequence of that diurnal rotation,
combined with a disturbing element producing thereby ;
the "precession of the equinoxes ;" whose whole cycle

is performed in about nine and a half millions of these
days, or turnings of the earthupon its own axis before
a distant fixed starand of which grand cycle not more
;
than a sixth part has been performed yet, within all

the period of human history.
—
But though these two phenomena, the sidereal day,
and the precessional period, of the earth, may be the
grand storehouses for reference in the regulation of time
for high science, —
some easy, simple, yet striking modifi-
cation of each is required for the practical purposes of
man in general. And then comes in the evident pro-
priety of using, for the shorter period, a solar, rather
than a sidereal, defined dayand in place of the exces-
;
sively long precessional period, the more moderate one

of a year, i.e., the time of the earth's revolution round
the sun ;though that is a movement experiencing many
minute perturbations and at the present period of de-
;
velopment of the universe, is by no means a nearly even

multiple of the other movement, whether we define the
year by reference to eithei* sidereal cwm solar, or purely
solar, phenomena.
These are points on which it is well worth while to

spend a few more words, in order to try to make the
case clearer to those of our readers who desire it. Let
us begin then with the days.
As the sidereal day is defined, in apparent astronomy,
to be the interval elapsing between a star leaving the
meridian of any place, through the earth's diurnal motion,
and returning to it again ( -h an excessively small correc-
tion for the precessional movement in the interval) ; so a
solarday is the time elapsing between the sun being on
the meridian of any one place and returning to it again
and that portion of time is equal to a sidereal day -|- the
amount, measured by the rate of solar motion, that
the sun has, in that interval, apparently retrograded
among the stars, by the really onward motion of the
earth in its ceaseless orbit around that splendid light
and heat-dispensing sphere. Hence a solar day is longer
than a sidereal one, and in such proportion, that if a
Chap. XV.] THE GREAT PFRAMID, i-js
year contain 365^ of the former, it will contain roughly

366^ of the latter.
When is required from day
absolute diurnal equality
to day, the solar days have to go through a computation
formula to reduce them from real solar days (as they
may appear to an observer, and therefore also called
apparent) to Tnean solar days or the successive places
;
that the sun would occupy in the sky if, in place of the
earth revolving in an elliptical orbit with a variable
velocity, it revolved in a circular orbit with a constant
velocity, the time of a whole revolution remaining the
same. But as this is only a residual correction,
which does not alter the beginning or ending of the
year at all, or the beginning or ending of any day
sensibly to the mere beholder of the general features of
nature, —we may at once contrast the sidereal and the
solar days together, as to their relative aptitudes to
promote the greatest good of the greatest number of
mankind.
Of the beginning of a sidereal day, then, hardly more
than a dozen persons in the kingdom are aware and, as ;
it begins at a different instant of solar time each day (in
the course of a year passing through the whole 24 hours),

even those few doctHnaires can only inform themselves
of the event, by looking at their watches under due
regulation.
But, of the far more easily distinguishable beginning
of a solar day, it was thus that a devout, though not
sacred or inspired, poet of the Talmud wrote centuries
ago and he will probably be equally heart-appreciated
;
still by every one :
" Hast thou seen the beauteous dawn, the rosy har-
binger of day ? Its brilliancy proceeds from the dwell-
ings of God : a ray of the eternal, imperishable Hght, a
consolation to man.
" As David, pursued by his foes, passed a dreadful
night of agony in a dreary cleft of Hermon's rock, lie

sang the most exquisitely plaintive of his psalms My :
'
soul is among lions : I lie in the dark pit among the

sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and
their tongue a sharp sword. Awake up, my glory,
awake lute and harp, I myself will awake right early.'
*'
Behold the dawn then broke heaviness endured
! ;
for a night, but joy came in the morning. With spark-

ling eyes the hind of the morning,' the soft and rosy
'
twilight, sprang forth, skimmed over hill and dale,

bounding from hill-top to hill-top further than one can
see ; and, like a message of the Deity, addressed the
solitary fugitive on the sterile rock Why dost thou :
*
complain that help is not near ? See how I emerge

from the obscurity of the night, and the terrors of
!
darkness yield before the genial ray of cheerful light

" David's eye was turned to the brightening hue of
the morn. Light is the countenance of the Eternal.
He saw the day-dawn arise, followed by the sun in all
its matutinal splendour, pouring blessings and happiness
over the earth. Confidence and hope returned to his

soul, and he entitled his psalm in the Cave of Adullam,
'
The roe of the morning, the song of the rosy dawn " !
'
If any species of day, then, is marked in the Great

Pyramid's metrological system, is it likely, after what
we have- already seen of that building's kindly feelings
for man, and its general objects and methods, — is it
likely, I be any other than the solar day (the

say, to
mean solar day, too, if it be represented evenly and
always by a cubit length) ?
And same reason, the Pyramid year can be no
for the
other than the mean solar tropical year or that which ;
is defined by the sun returning to the same tropic or
place of turning in its apparent motion in the sk}?

bringing on, therefore, the winter and summer, the
Chap. XV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 277
typical day and the night of the same

year, in the
self-evident, powerful, beneficent manner
mankind. to all
And of the previous mean solar days, in such a solar
tropical year, there are contained at present, according
to modern astronomy,
= 365-242242 + &c.
= 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 49*7 -}- &c., seconds
a length nearly 25 seconds shorter than the similar

year in the time of the Great Pyramid. A difterence
easy to write down on paper, but not practically sen-
sible to men in the ordinary avocations of life. But
no one be asked to decide for either, which kind of
will
day, or which kind of year, exists in the Great Pyramid
Metrology, —
without documents of contemporary date,
and enduring kind in stone, being actually discoverable
there.
The next succeeding arrangement, however, of time,
in all metrological systems, after days, is not this grand,
natural, yetmost inconveniently incommensurable, one
of a year but the short, and, by days, perfectly com-
;
mensurable one of, a week commensurable, however,

;
not by 5 or by 10, but by the peculiar, and otherwise

impressive, number 7.
Indeed, the week of 7 days is something so important
in itself, and forms so decided a stage of time whereon
tradition conflicts with science, sacred opposes profane,
and the Deistic contends with the rationalistic, — that it
may be prudent our now ensuing

for us to return, in
Part IV., to further rigid practical examinations of the
Great Pyramid endeavouring thereby to read off, with-
;
out prejudice, what that primeval monument has to say,

if anything, touching the voluntary, as well as the natural,
subdivisions of time for the ruling of the life and work

of man while on his trial here.
PAET IV.
MORE THAN SCIENCE,

*'THU8 SAITH the lord god; I "WILL ALSO DESTROY THE IDOLS (
"BGYPt), AXD 1 WILL CAUSE THEIR IMAGES TO CEASE OUT OF NOPH."

EZEKIEL XXX., 13.
CHAPTER XYI.
THE SACRED CUBIT OF THE HEBREWS.
Preliminary Note.
POINTEDLY remarkable as is the assistance already

afforded, as in Part III, chapter xiv., to the grand
Government survey of Great Britain, now in course of
execution, by the most ancient, and almost venerable,
2 5 -inch linear standard of the original and mysterious
design of the Great Pyramid, — that standard is 'likely
to be found of further service, and even invested with

peculiarpower and meaning, in other of our national
employments, not merely of the present, but the more
important future, of time also.
The reasons for this unexpected resuscitation of one
of the oldest metrological institutions of the whole
world, are partly scientific, and partly religious.
In science, nothing better can be found. For this
admirable standard may, as previously indicated, be
described as one twenty millionth of the earth's axis,
or rather, one ten millionth of the earth's semi-axis, of
rotation and in astronomy distances are usually, indeed
;
almost invariably, given by semi- axes or radii, and not

by diameters, of the various globes or orbits concerned.*
The distance from the earth to the sun, for instance,
* And certainly never, as in the boasted scientific French system, in
terms of the surface of any globe whatever.
282 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
being much more frequently under discussion, tlian

the space separating the earth's two positions at six
month's interval and it is in such a radial form
;
that the general problem is propounded and discussed
by mankind.*
all
While in religion, there is the feature about this

one length of Pyramid measure, which cannot fail,
when fully apprehended, to constitute a most peculiar
source of interest with some of the best minds in the
world; viz., that, however it came there, i.e., in the
Great Pyramid in the land of Egypt and in times before
the calling of Abraham, —
it is not only by its length
the representative, or equivalent, of the sacred cuhit

of the Hebrews, but it leads us to an understanding of
"
why that length was styled amongst them, the " sacred
cubit ; and why we may so call it likewise.
Of the Cvhits of Ancient Renown.

The mere name of ''
cubit " mounts up the question
at once to the beginning of human affairs, for it is one
of the earliest -named measures of which there is any
notice. Not indeed that the word cubit is ancient in
itself but that it is now the one English word always
;
used by our translators to express whatever measure of

length did form the working and practical standard of
linear measure to, or for, any and almost et'ery nation
in the ancient world. No nation could exist then,
any more than now, without having some standard of
* The distances of satellites from their primary planets are almost
invariably given by astronomers, in their professional publications, in
terms of radii of the said primaries the moon's distance from the earth,
;
for example, in terms of earth radii. But what earth radii ? Alas in !
equatorial radii which vary with the meridian, and are not the radii by
which the said distance is generally determined.
In such observations it is almost always the Polar radius which is
really employed, in whole or in part, by combining the meridian measure?
of Pulkova or Greenwich as high northern, and the Cape of Good Hope
or Melbourne as far southern, observatories.
Chap. XYI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 283
linear measure belonging to it ; but the standard of one

nation was no more the necfessary standard of another
and in a different age,
in a different part of the world
than the yard of the British Government, or two-foot
rule of the British people, is of the same length, origi-
nation, and meaning, as the metre of the French

nation, the Rhynland foot, or the Turkish pike.
National standards they are, all of them, but every one
of a different length from the other.
Hence, under the one name, convenient perhaps for
modern times from its shortness, of cvJoit, our trans-
lators have heaped together a number of totally different
measures of length, conflicting metrological symbolisms,
and diverse national distinctions. They have even done
worse for most persons having Latin enough to derive
;
cubit from cubitus, the elbow, they measure off 18

inches from their own elbow somewhere to the end of
the middle finger, and say, whenever the " cubit " of
any time or any nation whatever is mentioned, that
was the length of their standard measure.
Yet, though both the cubitus of the Romans and Trrjxv^
of the Greeks were very close to the length of 18
inches, the standard measures of other and older nations
were very different in length.
What names, then, were they called by; or were
there different names for different lengths of national
standards, in those days ?
In Egypt the standard was called, from 2170 B. c.
to 100 A. D., according to different modem Egypt-

ologists, "mah," "meh," " mahi," or ''mai:" and sig-
nified, according to W. Osburn, an excellent interpreter
of hieroglyphics, "justified" or "measured off."
Amongst the Assyrians, according to Mr. Fox Talbot
and Dr. Norris, measure was generally
their standard
termed, in the age of Nebuchadnezzar, or 700 B. C,
"ammat;" and in more ancient times, "hu."
284 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt IV.
Among the Hebrews, again, the standard measure

was called " ammah."* There is discussion still amongst
scholars whether this was the original, or Mosaic Hebrew,
word, for the thing to which it is now applied ; for some
authors maintain that ammah is an Assyrian word, and
introduced only by Ezra when he was recopying the
Scriptures in Babylon during the captivity. But they
cannot prove the case absolutely and meanwhile,
;
although there are some who will have it that the word
alludes to "the fore part of the arm" —though too we
are assured that the Hebrew standard was of a totally
different length from such part of the arm — there
are others who maintain that the word rather implies,
" the thing which was before in point of tione," the
thing which was " the first, the earliest, the mother '
measure," and even " the foundation of all measure."

But these disputations of the philologists are not
sufiicient for what we require now to know viz., what ;
actually were the lengths of the several linear standards

of ancient nations, in terms of modern British inches.
Those of Greece and Rome (mediaeval, however, rather
than ancient, as compared with the times of the Great
Pyramid) were, by practical rather than philological
inquiry, 18*24 British inches nearly, every one allows.
That of Egypt, a far older land than Greece or
Rome, was always longer, and close to 20*7 British
inches, by almost equally unanimous and universal
testimony.
There has, indeed, been a solitary attempt in modern
society,during the last four years, to assert that there
was a short cubit, of the same length as the Grecian, or
18-24 British inches, in use, and in great honour and
prominence too, in Egypt, for the one purpose of mea-
suring land, as early as the day of the Great Pyramid.
* See " Edinburgh Astronomical Observations," vol. xiii. pp. R 79 to

R82.
Chap.XVL] the great pyramid. 285
And as the author of this assertion is the Director-

General of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain and ;
as he has been adopted, supported, and followed therein

"
during the last year by the " Warden of the Standards
of our country, —it is necessary for me, a private author
only, in metrology, to demonstrate even at some length

the total baselessness of the idea. For otherwise these
two giants absolutely stop the way, and prevent all
Pyramid research.
further progress in Great
The, Old Egyptian Cubit ; and the recent attempt to

shorten it.
The mistake, — forand absolute mistake it

actual
undoubtedly is, —seems grown up thus. The
to have
Director-General of the Ordnance Survey, after having
twice tried and failed in the Athenceum, to establish
(against my " Life and Work at the Great Pyramid ")
two other reasons for accounting for the length of the
base-side of the ancient structure (using a different length
with each of them), — at last brought out a third length
and a third theory: this last length being 9,120 British
inches, and its accompanying theory, the gratuitous
statement that the base side of the building was intended
to be 500 times the Egyptian " land-cubit." And if
you grant, that besides the well-known cubit of old
Egypt, 20 7 inches long, there was also in existence at
the time of the Great Pyramid's foundation another
whose length was 18*24 British inches, evidently
cubit, —
500 times that length, does make up 9,120 of the same
inches.
But that length on paper, for the Great Pyramid's
base-side, was only obtained by most improperly, and
even dishonestly, keeping out of view the two largest,
and perhaps best, of the socket measures of the Pyramid's
base-side length viz., those of the French academicians
;
2S6 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
in 1800, and Colonel Howard-Vyse in 1887; both of

which measured-results the Director-General had before
him at the time of producing his new theory, together
with my own discussion of them and others. While,
as for the same high officer's assertion that there was,
besides the ordinary 207 inch cubit, also such a thing
as a land-cuhit in ancient Egypt, of the mediaeval
Grecian length too of 18*24 inches, that depended on —
nothing whatever but a most obstinate mistake of the
high military officer when reading a passage in Hero-
dotus which passage, in reality, says nothing of the
;
kind.
Herodotus, that charming relator of history as a
pleasant family tale, we must remember, is telling his
story to the Greeks ; and amongst other particulars of
what he saw in Egypt, informs them, of an allowance of
land to each of the soldiers there, of so many cubits
square to which account he appends the explanatory
;
remark, evidently for the benefit of his then hearers,

the Greeks, — that the Egyptian cubit is of the same
length as that of Samos.
This is positively all that the Director-General of the
Ordnance Survey has to go upon and it will be observed
:
that there is no allusion in the passage to there being two

cubits in use in Egypt one only is mentioned, and that
;
one cubit is stated to be the same in length, not as the

Greek cubit, but as that of Samos.
In fact, there is no case whatever for the great survey-
ing military chief at Southampton except in so far as
;
he, in addition to the above, chooses roundly to assert,

—and his brother giant, the Warden of the Standards,
to support him in the assertion, — that the cubit of Samos
was just the same as, and meant therefore nothing but,
the Greek cubit.
Now, as there is nothing whatever of ancient authority
existing in the world, as far as I am aware, touching
the absolute length of the cubit of Samos in the time of

Herodotus, 445 B.C. (except that slight verbal compara-
tive notice of his, saying that it was the same as the
Egyptian, rather than the Greek), we must endeavour to
ascertain from him, himself, what lie, Herodotus, meant,
— when Ae explained to a Greek audience in Athens, that
the length of the Egj^tian cubit was the same as the
cubit of Samos. Why, for instance, did he not say
that it was the same as the Greek cubit, if he meant
the Greek cubit ?
By turning to his book " Thalia," 55, we shall find that

Herodotus there makes a Lacedaemonian speak of the
Samians (in their isle so very close to Asia Minor and
so far from Greece) as '' foreigners." And again, in
'"Thalia," 5 6, he himself characteristically speaks of a siege
of Samos by the Lacedaemonian Dorians as " their (the
Greeks') first expedition into Asia." " Words," says the
Rev. Professor Eawlinson, " which are emphatic. They
mark the place which the expedition occupies in the
mind of Herodotus. It is an aggression of the Greeks
upon Asia, and therefore a passage in the history of the
great quarrel between Persia and Greece, for all Asia is
the king's " (i. 4)."^^
Samian, then, in the mind and feelings of Herodotus,

eminently meant Asiatic or Persian, the antipodes of
everything Greek and it was a rather delicate way of
;
that admirable describer telling his polite Athenian

audience, that the cubit of the strange and far-oft*
Egyptians he had been travelling amongst, was of the
same length as that of their hated and dreaded foes,
the Persians but without offending their ears by the
;
sound of the detested name. For Samos was but a poor

little island, in itself altogether innocent of making
See also "Edinburgh Astronomical Observations," vol. xiii. p. II 70.

aggressions on such a combination of states as Greece

and since its invasion by the Lacedaemonians, was much
better known to Greeks, than the continental and some-
what mysterious country of the Persians themselves.
Now, the Persian cubit, at and about the times of
Herodotus, say from 332 B.C. to 600 B.C., according to
Dr. Brandis, of Berlin, (whose investigations into the
Babylonian measures, weights, and money before Alex-
ander the Great, are original and most valuable), was
somewhere between 20*866 and 20*670 British inches.
Don Yincent Queipo, in his " Metrology " (Yol. I., pp.
277-280), makes the same Persian cubit to be 20*670
inches long. M. Oppert establishes the same length for
the Babylonian cubit in the times of Darius and Xerxes.
Dr. Hincks makes the cubit, equally too, of the Baby-
lonian, Persian, and Assyrian empires, chiefly from cunei-
form inscriptions iz= 21*0 inches. All of them, therefore,
within their limits of error, coinciding sufficiently with
a mean length of 20*69 inches nearly, for the Persian
cubit of and about 500 B.C. And that cubit length,
we may be Samos
sure, the said Persians established in
had the upper hand there seeing
for as long as they ;
that from the same Herodotus we learn (Book YL,

ch. no sooner were the Ionian cities under
24), that
Histioeus conquered by Artaphernes, than he took the
measurement of their whole country in 'parasangs (a
Persian measure of length, based on the cubit) and
settled thereupon the tributes which they were in future
to pay.
Hence the Samian cubit alluded to, was no other
than the Persian cubit of the day of Herodotus and
;
that cubit being of the length of 20*69 British inches by

universal, modern research, we may immediately see how
close to the truth the Father of History was, in declaring
the length of the Egyptian and the Samian, i.e., Persian,
cubits to be the same, —
when the Egyptian cubit has
been found by all modern Egyptological explorers to be

within a few tenths, or even hundredths, of an inch,
the very same quantity or, say for shortness, 20 '7
;
British inches.
Thus Sir Gardner Wilkinson in his " Manners and
Customs of the Ancient Egyptians" (Vol. IV. pp. 24
— 34, third edition, 1847), expressly declares against
the idea of there having been intentionally two difterent-
lengthed cubits in Pharaonic Egypt ; and gives the
following as measures of accidental variations of the
one and only Egyptian cubit belonging to any period
between 2200 B.C. and 320 B.C. :
20-47 British inches.

290 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IY.
duration all the spread and vital powers of language

and race, of politics, war and peace amongst them ; in
a large degree, no doubt, because the metrical matter
concerned, .was bound up not only with their religions,
but with the one primitive foundation of all those
idolatrous religions alike.
What then would have thought any of those nations,
but more especially the Egyptians (of whose spiritual
life we know most), of this recent most uncalled for
attempt by an Ordnance Surveying General at South-

ampton and a Standards administration official at
Whitehall, not only to degrade that grand 20-7-inch
standard of all the several great empires of the ancient
East, but incontinently to cut it down to the petty
size of subsequent cubit of the " impure
the long
;
Greeks " as every Egyptian who lived down to their
times had the pleasure of terming them. What, too,
more especially would have thought the Egj^ptians,
when in their " Dead Book " (the souls' vade "mecu/m
inserted in the coffin of every subject of Pharaoh),
there appears in black and yellow, — the most distinct
ejaculation to be made by such souls when standing
before the Judge of the dead ; viz., "I have not
skortened the cubit." And when one of the first sights
which " a justified soul " is supposed to behold after
passing the terrestrial bounds is, " the god Thoth with
the cubit in his hand "
''''
?
I will not even attempt to say what those ancient

Egyptians would have thought of our two modern
official whose carriages, in trying to stop the
giants,
way Pyramid research, have done them, the
of Great
Egyptians, so hateful an injury for I am horrified to ;
remember the Pharaonic pictures of human souls sent

* See ** Seven Homilies," by the Eev. J. T. Goodsir. Appendix, with
translaticn of the " Dead Book," by W. Osburn. Williams and Norgate,
1871.
Chap. XVL] THE GREAT PYRAMID, iqi
back from heaven to earth, in the bodies of pigs, for

than ''shortening the national cubit."
far lighter offences
Origination of the Profane Cubit of the East.
A particular length, then, and that something within,

probably or even certainly, a tenth of an inch of 20*7
inches, did undoubtedly and intentionally characterise,
and for many ages, the ancient cubit both of Egypt and
the far distant Babylon, Nineveh, and Persia, together with
all the great kingdoms historically arrayed in religion
against Israel ; and such cubit length was made a sacred
matter amongst them.
But in what else were their saxired ideas, i.e., chiefly
of Egypt and Babylon, common or similar ?
That very part of the " Dead Book " which enables
the Egyptian who has bought it from his priests, to
declare in words ready cut and dry for his use, that he
is free from that sin (into which the Ordnance Surveyor
and the Warden of the Standards have in these latter

days tumbled headlong), viz., oi shortening the cubit,
puts a long string of other declarations into his mouth,
protesting him to be also perfectly free from any and every
other possible sin, great or small, that was ever heard of.
And whether such unhappy being also believed and
trusted, as most of them did, in idols of animal-headed
gods, of whom there were sometimes more, and some-
times less, in the Egyptian Pantheon, all that — dreadful
as it is for human beings with souls to be saved, and
special instruction from the Creator — sinks into com-
parative insignificance before this unblushing assertion
of absolute self-righteousness.For that principle lasted
through all their varying theogonies and not only
;
shows the innate, settled Cainite direction of their

thoughts, but their continual antagonism also to the
religion of Abel, and to the whole Revelation doctrine
of the lost condition of man, with the consequent Chris-

tian necessity of an atonement by sacrifice and pardon
through the blood of. a Mediator.
All this doctrine of course to be found in the
is
Bible, and something of it in Josephus's account of

Genesis times also but where he obtained his further
;
particulars of Cain, and how far they are to be, or

should be, trusted, I know not. Yet they are pertinent
to the present question, and run thus viz., that after
;
Cain's expulsion from a more blessed society, and after

the mark was put upon him, he went on from one
wickedness to another until he at last invented " weights
and measures :" not so much, apparently, that they
were sinful in themselves, but that Cain employed them
as instruments of rapacity and oppression or as, in:
fact, the officers of the Assyrian king afterwards made

use of them in exacting cruel tribute from conquered
lands.
In self-defence therefore, implies Josephus, the descen-
dants of righteous Seth, in whose line afterwards came
Noah, Shem, Melchisedec, Abraham, and Moses, betook
themselves to studying astronomy, with the special
approval and help 9f Almighty God and when they ;
had perfected those discoveries, they set forth from their

own land (which was probably in Mesopotamia), to the
land of Siriad (that is the Siriadic, or Dog-star, land of
Egypt), and inscribed their discoveries there on two
pillars, one of stone and one of brick.
They did not therefore seek either to teach or enforce
these things on the Egyptian people whom they found
there ; merely recorded their astronomical dis-
they
coveries in their own way, to their own satisfaction in
that land, because it was a more suitable land for that
purpose than their own and they recorded them by
;
means of masonry, most certainly illegible to all un-

scientific natives around. And what such discoveries in
Chap. XYI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 293
astronomy could have been, to enable them to have a

counter effect to the bad weights and measures of Cain,
unless they were connected with a principle of earth .
and heaven commensurability adapted to a people's

measures in length, capacity, and weight, leading their
souls therefore, and thereby, to think lovingly, sym-
pathetically, harmoniously, and Abel-like, of God, it —
is difficult to conceive.
In fact, according to the nature of the things said to
be inscribed, the above alluded to stone pillar, or monu-
ment (which Whiston, wholly ignorant of hieroglyphic
interpretation, proposed to identify with a Cainite
obelisk of an idolatrous king of Egypt in Thebes during
the 19th Dynasty), —
can be no other than the Great
Pyramid, While the similar hrick monument, erected
by the same Sethite parties (descendants only of Seth
through the Flood), must, if ever finished, have gone
the way of all the brick pyramids of profane Egypt
viz., subsided into a heap of decaying mould.
But I do not ask any one to dejpend solely, for any

one important thing, on Josephus though, from the
;
large amount of accordance between him and the Bible

in numerous other points, it would not be wise to alto-
gether reject a whole argument in all its parts and
ramifications, merely because it is found in Josephus
and in no other preserved writing of olden times.
The passage, however, quoted above, does, even when
considerably pruned, open up a very suggestive view,
of a metrological contrast, entirely agreeable with Bibljcal
characteristics, though depending on microscopic re-
finements only understood by modern science within
the last century. It tells us, I venture to say, of a
metrological contrast between Cain and Abel having
been carried by some of their descendants through the
Flood and of these parties having been distinguished
:
by the most opposite kinds of weights and measures.

294- OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
And when we further find by later researches that the

and decidedly Cainite nations, spread abroad
anti-Israel,
even from the Nile to the Euphrates, though often warring
vehemently with each other, were yet banded together
to employ one and the same cubit length of 20 '7 inches,
we must look upon that measure as the Cain-invented,
Cain-descended, cubit. When, too, we find that that
length is measures of both
totally incongruous to the
the earth and the heavens, and not evenly in any way
commensurable thereto, or conforming .therewith, it —
opens up the most intense anxiety to ascertain whether
the cubit of the descendants of Seth, in the line of
Abraham, and representative of the cause of righteous
Abel, had any of the admirable earth-commensurability
and nature harmonious properties which have been dis-
covered in the standards of the Great Pyramid.
The Sacred Cubit of the Hebrews.
And here, alas for the Church of England from the !
time of Bishop Cumberland of Peterborough, down to

the Bible dictionaries of Kitto and Smith, the annotated
Government printers, and the maps of Jeru-
Bibles of the
salem prepared for the Palestine Exploration Association
by the Ordnance Survey establishment at Southampton.
For all these supposed unquestionable authorities merely
indicate, ignorantly (both as Christians and
lazily,
scientists), "
The Hebrew measures are impossible to
find out by the mere words of the Bible, so we go to
the (Cainite) Egyptians and take, and give you, their
:
(self-righteous, God-defying) measures as representing

(the Inspired sacredness of) the Hebrew !
" And such
numbers of inches too as these blinded men give, under
that guise, are more often derived from mediseval or
Grecianised, but still idolatrous, Egypt, than the Egypt
of her most ancient, or even Exodus, day.

Chap. XVI.] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 295
In this dilemma of the flock's desertion, or misleading,

by its proper shepherds, how thankful should we be,
that it pleased God to raise up the spirit of Newton

amongst us ; and enabled him to make it one of the most
important discoveries of his riper years —
though the
opposition of the Church of England has caused it to
remain unread almost to the present day, —
that while
there undoubtedly was in ancient times a cubit of 20 '7
inches nearly, characterising the nations of Egypt, Assyria,
Babylonia, and Phoenicia, and which cubit Newton calls
unhesitatingly ''
the profane cubit ;
" there was another
which he equally unhesitatingly speaks of as the sacred
cubit and shows that it was decidedly longer than the
;
above, and most earnestly preserved, treasured up, and

obeyed, among some very limited branches of the house
of Shem. The exact date of its promulgation Newton
does not attempt to fix, but alludes to the certain fact
"
of its having become the " proper and principal cubit
of the Israelites, long before they went doivn to Egypt^
Now the precise size of this remarkable cubit, and
which seems eventually to have remained in the sole
possession of the Hebrews, and to have been, after
the Egyptian captivity, employed by them for sacred,
Biblically sacred, purposes only, Sir Isaac Newton
attempts to ascertain in various modes thus :
1 By notices from Talmudists and Josephus in terms

of Greek cubits, which on calculation give, as limits,
something between 31 '24 and 24 '30 British inches.
2. From Talmudists by proportion of the human
body, giving as limits, from 27*94 to 2328 British
inches.
3. From Josephus' s description of the pillars of the
temple, between 27*16 and 23*28 British inches.
* See " Sir Isaac Newton's Dissertation on Cubits," reprinted in vol. ii.
of my " Life and Work at the Great Pyramid."
t On the mean determination by many authors that 1 Attic foot 12*16 =
British inches ; and one lloman uncia =
0*97 British inches.
4. By Talmudists and " all Jews' " idea of a Sabbath

day's journey between 27'16 and 23*28 Britisli inches.
5. By Talmudists' and Josephus's accounts of the
steps to the Inner Court, between 26*19 and 23*28
British inches.
6. By many Chaldaic and Hebrew proportions to the
cubit of Memphis, giving 24*83 British inches. And,
7. From a statement by Mersennus, as to the length
of a supposed copy of the sacred cubit of the Hebrews,
secretly preserved amongst them, concluded = 24*91
British inches.
Now in all these seven methods any one may observe
that that heathen length of Egypt and Babylon, viz.,
20*7 inches, has no standing-place whatever; neither
beside the single determinations, nor within the widest
limits of the double determinations. What is indicated
—
by the numbers, appears to be, either 24 inches with
a large fraction added to it, or 25 inches with a small
fraction, or something between the two and if we say
;
25 inches with an uncertainty of a tenth of an inch

either way, depending on the rudeness of the references,
we shall probably be borne out by every one who
examines. Sir Isaac Newton's original paper ably, care-
fully, and without prejudice.
Most triumphantly, then, ended Sir Isaac Newton's
researches, in showing that the cubit, or rather the
linear standard, of that peculiar people who were
religiously representative of Abel, was absolutely and
totally different, in the radical and governing feature of
length, from the cubit, or linear standard of all the
unhappily numerous and powerful empires representing
Cain, in the ancient world. And there he stopped. But
now, with the new ideas opened up by John Taylor
from his researches, literary though they were only, at
the Great Pyramid, we find that a length of 25*025
British inches, or a length abundantly within the limits
Chap. XVL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 297
of the conclusions to be drawn fromNewton's Sir Isaac

numbers for the Hebrew sacred
not onlycubit, —is
earth commensurable, but earth commensurable, and

nature harmonious, according to Sir John Herschel, in
the best conceivable manner or with the earth's astro-
;
nomical axis of rotation. So accurately, too, and in so

difficult a subject, that as we have already shown in
the first part of this book, no such conclusion could
have been intentionally arrived at by any race or nation
of men in the early age when the Great P^âmid was
founded, — without their being favoured by some super-
human and supranatural, that is. Divine, assistance.
That the Hebrew race would have received such
assistance from the Almighty, if they really needed it,
no true believer in the Bible will doubt for a moment.
And now when we find, and shall afterwards be able to
confirm from other sources, that they had the very thing
amongst them which, as the highest modern science
testifies, could only have been a supranatural gift in that
age, the further question is answered, as soon as it
arises, — viz., whether the gift may

have really after all
come to them in the manner indicated by Josephus ;
i.e., through primeval Divine assistance accorded to

Seth, as represented in his earlier descendants and ;
that it was granted to them, not merely to improve

them in astronomy, but also to strengthen them against
the religiously opposed descendants of Cain.
Now the Egyptians were Cainites, not only from what
has already been shown from their own " Dead Book,"
but from Biblical history indicating that they had, like
Cain, refused the sin-offering lying at the door, and
had scornfully banded themselves together to consider
the Divinely-appointed means of reconciliation "an
abomination unto them." '^ Therefore, when Israel was
in Egypt, Abel and Cain tjqDically met once again, and
* John Taylor's •« Great Pyramid," p. 217.
we all know with what results of cruelty within the
power of Cain to inflict. We also know in a parallel

manner, by metrological research, that that Mizraite
edition of Cain held then, and continued to hold
through all his national existence, to his 20*7 inch
standard measure while, through Sir Isaac Newton
;
the astounding information first came, that the Hebraite

Abel at the same time likewise kept true, through
all his persecutions, to his oppositely derived, Seth-
descended, 25*025 inch, better standard.
These two opposing standards, therefore, clashed
together in Egypt, B.C. 1500, and God gave the victory
in the end to Abel's.
But they met together again, as Sir Isaac Newton
himself points out, after the Exodus, and even in the
very presence of the Tabernacle in the wilderness for ;
the Israelites would employ the Egyptian cubit of 20 '7

inches long for many though
of their ordinary purposes ;
Moses was always most and apparently successful,

precise,
in seeing that in their sacred work they employed only
their sacred cubit, i.e., " the cubit of the Lord their
God;" viz., the earth-axis commensurable cubit of
25-025 inches long. ;.
The Mixed Presence of the Two Cubits, Sacred and

Profane.
But it may be asked. Why did the Israelites con-

tinue to employ two cubits ? If, as Sir Isaac Newton
states,they brought their own sacred cubit, which they

had possessed of old, down with them into Egypt, pre-
served it when there, and took it out with them again,
— why was that one not enough for all their purposes ?
The first answer to this question is by Sir Isaac him-
self.
" They, the Hebrews, brought," says he, " their own
sacred measure to Egypt with them but living for

;
above two hundred years (four hundred according to

some chronologists) under the dominion of the Egyp-
tians, and undergoing a hard service under them,
especially in building, where the measures came daily
under consideration, they must necessarily learn the
Egyptian cubit."
The second answer is, " Did the Israelites succeed in
freeing themselves at the Exodus from every other
taint and sin of the Cainite people they had been
sojourning amongst ? Nay, indeed, were they free from
the sins of many innate, born, and predestined Cainites
among themselves ? Search the Scriptures, and the
answer comes up too plainly.
It was not, apparently, the purpose of God to create
even his chosen people absolutely immaculate or to ;
make it impossible for them to sin, even if they should

try. Therefore was it that temptations to evil (though
in a measure only) were left to prove them and amongst ;
other forms of seduction, the insidious Cainite 207-

inch cubit, as well as the true cubit of Abel of the
25-025-inch length.
Now, exactly as these two cubits were contending
with each other, and either ensnaring or saving men's
souls in the very camp of the Israelites ruled by Moses,
so is it still in that wondrous erection in Egypt, the
Great Pyramid, to this day.
Sir Isaac Newton showed from the measures of Pro-
fessor Greaves in 1638, that various minor parts of the
Great Pyramid were laid out in terms of the 20*7 inch
cubit of Memphis, i.e., the Cainite cubit sacred to Egypt
but profane to the Israelites and I, having gone over
;
some parts of the Pyramid, measuring-rod in hand, have

testified, in Vol. II. p. 340 of my
and Work,"
''
Life
that Sir Isaac Newton is and
there perfectly correct ;
the instances may partly have been brought about by

300 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pabt IV.
the necessity, even of a Seth-descended architect of the

Great Pyramid, employing the idolatrous natives of
Egypt with their one and only cubit familiar to them,
as his working masons and mere hodmen in the great
work whose ultimate object and purpose they were per-
fectly ignorant of, and would have opposed if they had'
known.
But that does not destroy, nay, it rather rivets atten-
tion to, the grander Pyramid fact which had escaped
the understanding of all mankind until after the days
of John Taylor ;
(escaped them, too, though it was
prominently in their midst, and with nothing to hide
it from any one, even from the beginning of history) ;
viz., that if you subdivide the base-side length of the
Great Pyramid by the number of days in a year, you

obtain, by such application of an astronomical time-
measure, —the sacred Hebrew, earth- commensurable,
aTiî-Cainite cubit, and find that Sethite rod to be a
ruling feature of the ultimate design of the whole vast
fabric.
'
T}ie, Sacred in Time, as well as Space.
Now this conjunct employment in the Pyramid, of

sacred measures of length and true measures of time, is
all the more noticeable, because during their national

slavery to the hardest of taskmasters, the Israelites got
inevitably into the way of using, for secular purposes,
something else besides the profane measures of length
of the Egyptians for they adopted their imperfect
;
mode of measuring time as well, or of telling off the

days, first by lunar, and then by reputed solar months.
Yet of all the Mosaic institutions, nothing is better
appreciated, in our country at least, than that Moses
contended gloriously with his countrymen for the non-
Egyptian time-measure of, a week of six days, followed
by a Sabbath of rest and that he so contended because
;
such a time-measure was an original ordinance, not of

man, but of the Lord his God, and to be observed by the
faithful and God-fearing of mankind for ever and ever.
Has the Great Pyramid, then (Sethite as we may call
it now, though not Mosaic), any allusions to that most
distinguishing time-measure of Kevelation, the week, as

it is in the Bible ?
Alas how little do we yet know of the Great Pyra-

!
mid and how much there is still to learn. To learn

:
indeed; but not from our many modern Egyptologists,

as they proudly call themselves. For surely by this
time we should have acquired a wholesome fear of those
who, instead of studying the Great Pyramid from a
truly religious and Christian, or any, point of view, have
rushed headlong into a Cainite desire to know more
about the sanctified bulls and cats, crocodiles and
ibises, snake and beetle gods, and all the other un-
holy holies of that impure Egyptian nation ; —
a people
answering more closely than any other to St. Paul's
description of the ancient world ; as composed of
those, who are without excuse, — because that, "when
(in primeval and patriarchal times) they knew God,
they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful
but became vain in their imaginations, and changed
the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made
like to and to birds and four-footed
corruptible man,
beasts and creeping things. A people who changed the
truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served
the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for
ever. Amen."
To those, then, who are happily freed, but not by
human learning, from this dreadful hankering of modern
Egyptological scholars, and keepers of Egyptian museum
galleries, to become wise in old idolatry, — how grandly
rise in noble aspirations, the thoughts of any fair, honest
mind, on merely beholding the external mass of the
Great Pyramid ! For thus writes a recent traveller, a

plain and simple style of working-man almost, but with
the higher feelings which spring from Christian edu-
cation and the improving sentiments which labour of
head and hand, in company with his brother men in
an appointed path, irresistibly teaches, —
thus he writes,
(without, however, as might too probably be expected in
a stranger, unfurnished with any scientific instruments
of measure, sufficiently distinguishing the Great Pyramid
from the other pyramids, its copies without souls, or
minds either, in the immediate neighbourhood) :
" To view them merely as gigantic monuments is a

novelty productive of impressions of sublime grandeur,
of which words fail to convey any accurate conception ;
but when they are viewed in connection with the history

of the human race, as older than the oldest records, and
marked with the antiquity of those ages long gone by,
when the earliest of the patriarchs entered Egypt, the
mind becomes absorbed, and I felt as though I could
have lain, not for hours only, but even for nights and
days, indulging in the sight of the greatest of these
pyramids." " With the Hebrews, to look back beyond
the time of Abraham, was deemed a glimpse of eternity

and the passage, " Before Abraham was' I AM," is at
once presented to the mind in connection with this view.
Yet even in Abraham's time, it is supposed that these
^'^
pyramids were works of venerable antiquity."
True, most true and in the Great Pyramid we have
;
found enshrined, established in the solid architecture,

but yet unseen from those pre-Abrahamic, down to
these latter days, that identical sacred, earth-commen-
surable, measure of space, which, according to Sir Isaac
Newton, the leaders of the Hebrew race had received
long before they went down to Egypt.
* **
Notes on Egypt," by T. Sopwith, Esq., C.E., privately printed.
Chap.XVL] the great pyramid, 303
Is it possible, then, let us fear not to ask again, that

any allusion to the earliest written Divine command,
the measuring of time by a sabbatical week of seven
days, may be found in that grandest, and most purely
Sethite, of stone records also ?
Search may be made but even the best of us should

;
pray in the course of it, to be guarded against being

led away by^mere coincidences, by mistaken observa-
tions, and even intended stumbling-blocks and rocks of
offence for surely things exist in the Great Pyramid
:
very much as they do in the world outside, and even

as they did in the sacred camp of the Tabernacle under
—
Mount Sinai itself, to try us, and prove whether our
faith be correct as well as strong.
30+ OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
CHAPTER XYII.
" TIME MEASURES IN THE GREAT PYRAMID."
but one mode of

ONinquiry,
this important question there is
attention to the measures of the whole

viz.,
and its coupled with the quality of the work con-

parts ;
cerned, and followed by the theory, whatever that may

ultimately prove to be, which explains the greatest
number of facts.
Now one ifime-measure has already been indicated in
the circumstance that the sacred, Hebrew, or pyramid
cubit is of such a length that it measures the base-side
of the Great Pyramid by the number of days, and frac-
tions of a day, in a year ; while another, includes a
practical demonstration of ourmodern leap-year arrange-
ment in the exhibition of the four sides, or years, which
make up a cycle of years complete to a day or, as the ;
symbolism of the ante-chamber indicates, almost a day ;
for, of the four grand grooves there, of which three are
hollow, and the fourth only, filled, that fourth one is not
equal in breadth to the other three. (See Plate X.)
But a grander time-measure is obtained by view-
still
ing the whole Pyramid's base periphery in the light of

its equivalent circle, struck with a radius equal to the
vertical height of the Pyramid ; w^hich, by its sun-distance

commensurability, symbolises the sun in the centre of
that circle for then the interval of twenty-four solar
;
hours, or the time elapsing between the sun apparently

Chap.XVIL] the great pyramid, 305
leaving the meridian of any place and returning to it
again, by virtue of the rotation of the earth on its axis

before the sun, i.e., a mean solar day, — is measured off
on that circle's circumference by 100 pyramid inches
evenly.
French Savants on the Passages of the Great Pyramid.
But if the time symbolism of the exterior of the

Pyramid is thus clear and simple enough, that of the
interior presents many difficulties.
The entrance passage has indeed already been else-

where shown to be connected with the meridian transit
of a circum-polar star but why did the builders make
;
both that passage and the first ascending passage so

excessively low, that a man can hardly pass through
them, even crawling on his hands and knees and ;
another, the Grand Gallery, so astonishingly high, that

the blazing torches of Arab guides seldom suffice, in its
mere darkness rendered somewhat visible, to show the

ceiling to wondering visitors !
No approach to a sufficient answer to these questions

has yet been given anywhere and all that violent, and
;
apparently unreasonable, contrast of heights, remains

the most mysterious thing in its origin, at the same
time that, in its existence, it is one of the best ascer-
tained facts about the whole Great Pyramid.
The French Academicians, even in their day, en-
larged much and learnedly on the circumstance but ;
could neither solve that nor many other points, about

both the Grand Gallery and the smaller passages.
Almost in despair at last, but the despair of an
honest and well-read man, unashamed to confess the
truth that such a case was too difficult for him,
— M. Jomard exclaims at p. 198, '' Description do
I'Egypte," " Everything is mysterious, I repeat it, in the
X
3o6 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
construction and distribution of the monument ; the

passages, oblique, horizontal, sharply bended, of different
dimensions!" And again, at p. 207 of "Antiquit^s,
M^moires," '' We are not at all enlightened either upon
the origin, or the employment, the utility, or any motive
whatever, for the gallery and various passages of the
Great Pyramid but do we know anything more either
;
about the well, or much rather about the 28 square

holes or cavities worked with skill alon^ '& the sides of
the high ascending gallery ?
Professor Greaves describes the Passages of the Great

Pyramid.
Where so many great men have failed, we must pro-

ceed with caution indeed ; and commencing therefore at
the beginning, with what has been known to, and con-
fessed by, most travellers for ages, I will, at present,
merely call attention to the extraordinary pains that
were taken by the original builders with the structure
of all these passages.
Even with the first, or entrance passage, the most
used and abused of the whole, both in mediaeval and
—
modern times, yet the regularity and beauty of its
fabric composed of whiter, more compact, and homo-
geneous stone than is to be seen anywhere else, and in
enormous blocks admirably worked, seems to have been
ever the admiration of all beholders. Professor Greaves,
in 1638, exclaims (with almost a Tennysonian feeling of
the romantic belonging rather to 1860), on beholding
this passage some 3,800 years after its builders had
been laid in the dust, and their spirits had returned to
God who gave them, " the structure of it hath been
the labour of an exquisite hand."
Yes, truly but to bring back the " tender grace of
;
a day so very lon^ since 4ead," and receive a clear intel-

Chap. XVII.] THE GREAT PYRAMIL^ 307
lectual explanation of wherefore these things came to

pass, — ^how vain it would be merely to sigh, and ever so
anxiously wait, for
" The touch of that vanish'd hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still."
Nor does the Savilian professor abandon himself to vain

regrets but goes on methodically to describe the
;
mechanical elements of the excellence which he had

noted such as, " the smoothness and evenness of the
;
work," " the close knitting of the joints," and the

accuracy with which the exact breadth of 3 '4 6 3 of
the English foot,* is kept up through a length of
92-5 feet. But when Greaves comes soon afterwards
over against a portion of that rough fragment of
a side-passage forced in barbarous times of spolia-
tion by Caliph Al Mamoun, he correctly describes
that as "a place somewhat larger,and of a pretty
height, but lying incomposed ;an obscure and broken
place, length 89 feet,
the the breadth and height
various, and not worth consideration." And again, " by
whomsoever (among the moderns) it was constructed,
is not worth the inquiry nor does the place merit the
;
describing but that I was unwilling to pretermit any-

;
thing, being only an habitation for bats, and those so

ugly and of so large a size, exceeding a foot in length, that
I have not elsewhere seen the like." f (See Plate VIII.)
* Equivalent to 41*51 pyramid inches, my measures in I860 havinjf
given for extremes 4r58 and 41*46, and the mean of all, 41*49 of the same
inches ;or differing from my astronomical predecessor, after two cen-
turies, by only 2i)\)oth of the whole.
t Murtodi, an Aiabian author, says, "As big as black eagles." Pro-
fessor Greaves evidently did not recognise in 1638, neither indeed did
Dr. Clarke in 1800, that this "incomposed hole" was really the rough
passage of forced entrance made by the early Arabian Caliph and ;
it required Colonel Howard- Vyse's clearing away of the rubbish mound

outside, in 1837, to prove the fact, by exhibiting the outer end of the hole
as well. But the very circumstance of Professor Greaves not boiuif
acquainted with these latter day facts, makes his correct description of
the interior all the more creditable to him.
3o8 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt IV.
When, on the
' contrary, the same Professor Greaves, by
aid of that yawning hiatus in the masonry to the west of
the portcullis, got round and above that granite block
obstruction between the entrance, and first ascending, pas-
sages proper, and reached this latter work of the ancient
builders, —
a passage of the same breadth, nearly as the
entrance or descending passage, —
he then resumes his
more graceful imagery, and writes " The pavement of
:
this rises with a gentle acclivity, consisting of smooth

and impolished marble (limestone), and, where not
smeared with filth, appearing of a white alabaster (cream)
colour ;the sides and roof, as Titus Livius Burretinus,
a Venetian, an ingenious young man, who accompanied
me thither, observed, were of impolished stone, not so
hard and compact as that of the pavement, but more soft
and tender." And I, in my turn, have now, 285 years
after King Charles the First's professor of astronomy left
the Pyramid, to report, as an apparent consequence of
that tender softness described by him, that the upper
part of the walls, and more especially the roof of much
of this passage, have exfoliated or decayed to the extent
of a foot or more in many places, —
while the floor, on
the other hand, has rather hardened to the feet (usually
naked feet, though) of Arabs, and exhibits a peculiar
change of the limestone actually verging upon the
consistence of flint, yet keeping nearly true still to the
ancient test marks of the floor level on either side wall.
And then when he arrives in the far freer and more
elevated space of the second ascending passage, or the
Grand Gallery, the fine old Oxford professor, who well
knew what architectural beauties were, speaks of iif as "a
very stately piece of work, and not inferiour either in
respect of the curiosity of art, or richness of materials,
to the most sumptuous and magnificent buildings." And
again, " this gallery or corridor, or whatsoever else I
may call it, is built of white and polished marble (lime-
Chap. XYIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 309
stone), the which is very evenly cut in spacious squares

or tables. Of such materials as is the pavement, such
is the roof, and such are the side walls that flank it the ;
coagmentation or knitting of the joints is so close, that

they are scarce discernible to a curious eye and that ;
which adds grace to the whole structure, though it

makes the passage the more slippery and difficult, is the
acclivity and rising of the ascent. The height of this
gallery 26 (more nearly 28) feet the breadth 6 '870
is ;
feet, which 3*435 feet are to be allowed for the way

of
in the midst, which is set and bounded on both sides
with two banks (like benches) of sleek and polished
stone each of these hath 1*7 17 of a foot in breadth,
;
'"'"
and as much in depth."

" Upon the top of these benches, near the angle
where they close and join with the wall, are little
spaces cut in right-angled parallel figures, set on each
side opposite one another, intended, no question, for
some other end than ornament.''
*'
In the casting and ranging of the marbles (lime-
stone), in both the side walls, there is one piece of
architecture in my judgment very graceful, and that is
that all the courses or ranges, which are but seven (so
great are these stones), do set and flag over one another
about three inches the bottom of the uppermost
;
course overflagging the top of the next, and so in order

the rest as they descend."
In the edition of Greaves's works by Dr. Birch in
1737, from which I quote, there is an attempt to
represent these things graphically, by the book being
*'
adorned with sculptures," and " illustrated with cuts
By my measures in I860, in pyramid inches, and taking a mean of
all the variations caused hy the tile-setting of the stones forming the
ceiling or roof, the vertical height between sloping floor, and parallel
sloping roof, was =339-2, and the computed transverse height =
304*1,
the whole breadth being 82*2 the lower breadth between the ramps
;
=
42-0
and thfi ramps themselves 20-07 broad, and 20-96 high in the transverse,
or shorteat, direction.
3ro OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
by a curious hand;" and in the great French work

some efforts in a high class of design are engraved in
Hne, to represent perspective views looking both upward
and downward in the Grand Gallery ; but they are all
of them to some extent failures. The circumstances

are above the scope of orthodox pictures by reason of
the narrow breadth, the lofty vaulting height, and the
very peculiar sloping angle of the long floor a floor, ;
when one looks from its north end southward, ascending,

and ascending through the darkness apparently for
ever and with such steepness, that no artist's view of
;
it, painted on a vertical plane, could ever hope to

represent more than a small part of that floor, rising
upward through the whole canvas and going out at the
top. While on looking northward from the south end
of the gallery, you lose the floor instantly, and see on
the level of your eyes in the distance, part of the
steeply descending ceiling ; descending, too, still further
and going out at the bottom of the picture, if your
means of illumination extend so far. (See Plate XII.)
Otherwise, it is the solemn overlappings of the high
dark walls, passing you by on either side, to draw
together in dim and unknown perspective beyond,
which encase you in on every hand but all on an ;
uneasy slant, speaking of toil in one direction, danger

in another, and a mountain of strength for a prison
house, if so required, everywhere.
Modem Measures of the Passages.
In the first edition of this book, I was positively

puzzled to make out, let alone the mysterious Grand
Gallery, the simple sizes of the smaller passages ;and
erred considerably in choosing among the conflicting
testimonies of former travellers. But a four months' resi-
dence on the spot, most completely settled all that class
Chap. XVII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 3"
of difficulties ; and enables me now to speak confidently

thus : —Although there are some pieces of horizontal
passage in the Great Pyramid, their length is as nothing
compared to the length of the inclined passages. The
angle of inclination in a vertical plane of these pas-
sages is 26° 18' nearly, being the same whether the
passages are ascending or descending (within errors
of construction amounting 1-1 20 th of the whole)
to ;
and the transverse size, that is, breadth and height,

excepting only the utterly diverse Grand Gallery, being
also the same or at least, having certainly been so,
;
before the abrading and exfoliating of the more " soft

and tender " of the stones began. Confining my-
self, however, to well-preserved portions of the ancient
surface, and just now to the entrance-passage alone, I
obtained the following measures for its breadth and
height.
Entrance Passage.
Breadth and transverse height as measured in 1865.
Place where the

measure was
made referred to
the flour-joints.
312 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Paut IV.
The manner in which these numbers run, will indicate

to any practical man the degree of opportunity which
the Great Pyramid still presents for respectable accuracy
of measure, by those who Avill trouble themselves to
seek out the best-preserved parts, and endeavour to
do them justice. But what is the meaning of the
word height in the above table being qualified as
" transverse height " ?
These Pyramid passages being all of them inclined,

have two sorts or kinds of height 1, transverse height,
;
or the shortest distance between floor and ceiling, and

which was the easier kind of height to measure accurately
with the sliding scales which I had had constructed for the
purpose and, 2, vertical height, or height in the direc-
;
tion of a plumb-line, and the more usual, indeed almost

the universal, mode of measuring heights in masonry
structures elsewhere.
Now, putting all the observations together, I deduced
47*24 Pyramid inches to be the transverse height of
the entrance passage and computing from thence with
;
the observed angle of inclination the vertical height,

that came out 52*76 of the same inches. But the sum
of those two heights, or the height taken .up and down,
= 100 inches: which length, as elsewhere shown, is
the general Pyramid linear representation of a day of
24 hours. And the mean of the two heights, or the
height taken one way only, and impartially to the
middle point between them, 50 inches = which ;
quantity is, therefore, the general Pyramid linear

representation of only half a day. In which case let
us ask, what the entrance passage has to do with half,
rather th|in a whole, day ?
Astronomy of the Entrance Passage.

If you descend at night a certain distance down the
sloping floor of the entrance passage, and then turn
Chap. XVIL] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 3 .
round and look upwards and towards the north, to its

open mouth, you will see any large star whose distance
is 3° 42' nearly from the Pole, if it should chance to be
crossing the meridian at that moment in the lower part

of its daily circle : —always supposing that there is at
this present time a star at that distance, bright enough
to be easily seenby the naked eye and indeed there is
;
such a one very nearly in the required position, viz.,

8 Ursse minoris, 3° 24' from the Polar point.
But that star was not always there being carried ;
on and on through an immense celestial round at the

rate of about 1 2 degrees nearly, for every thousand years,
by that grand mechanism of the earth and the heavens
called amongst astronomers the precession of the equi-
noxes ; —
the most important too of all celestial pheno-
mena for fixing the exact chronology of the earlier periods
of man upon was Sir John Herschel who, in
earth. It
answer to a letter from Colonel Howard- Vyse on his
return from his immortal Pyramid explorations in
Egypt, in 1837-8, first laid down the application of
that essential astronomical law with regard to the Great
Pyramid. And, indeed, he did more for, assuming ;
the ^prevailing idea of his then time, that the Great

Pyramid's foundation was somewhere about 4,000 years
ago, he searched the starry heavens, as moving under the
influence of precession, and found that, for all the last
5,000 years, only one notable star had been at the re-
quired Polar distance, so as to look exactly down the
descending entrance-passage of the Great Pyramid at its
— the star's —
lower meridian culmination and that ;
star a Draconis —
by modern name was in that critical
position somewhere about 2160 B.C. That date there-
fore made up with 1838 (and excluding for the time
four possibly unrecorded years at the beginning of our
era), 3,998 years ago as the epoch of the passage angle
being laid, to suit a chronological phenomenon of ex-
cellent astronomical kind, and peculiar to the Pyramid

builders' day.
This near agreement of general Egyptological theory,
as it was in London in 1840 A. D., with the result of
computations by modern astronomy when adapted to

measures of still existing facts at the Great Pyramid,
seemed to take the English world by a storm of
admiration and every one allowed, for a while, that the
;
whole affair was quite settled. But, alas those were!
simple, innocent days under good King William and

the quiet Queen Adelaide. The up- springing of German
theology in this country, and the demands of natural-
history science overleaping itself, and calling out every-
where for long were scarcely begun
dates, and the ;
only opposition then ventured was from certain literary

Egyptologists, who protested that the astronomy of Sir
John Herschel's paper was only an accidental coincidence
with the passage-angle; because said passage, having
been made, as they knew, merely to slide a sarcophagus
down to its resting-place, and having been filled up
choke full to its mouth, after that was done, with solid
blocks of stone, it could not have been used as an
observatory by astronomers.
The answer to this Egyptologic protest, was easy
first
enough. John Herschel had not said that the pas-

Sir
sage was intended to serve as a permanent observatory
but that its cream-white, stone-lined, long tube seemed
to memorialize a particular phenomenon of the day when
it was being built, and of that day only a record, ;
therefore, by mêmôrial astronomy (whatever other prac-

tical use the passage may, or may not, have served),
of a special sidereal fact, to become increasingly impor-
tant in distant ages for the purpose of chronology.
That explanation holds perfectly true still. But
with regard to the other part of the question, as to
whether Sir John Herschel's astronomical conclusion
Chap. XVIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 315
is still to be held as confirming, and confirmed by, the

date arrived at by the very latest studies of the Egypto-
logists among the uncertain documents of profane and
idolatrous Egypt (generally too, long subsequent to the
Great Pyramid's foundation) what a change had
; alas !
passed over London society by the time that it had

come to be my turn to go out to the Great Pyramid
in 1864, and print upon it in 1867, 8, and 9 !
Then to talk of 4,000 years ago for the Great

Pyramid's date of foundation All Egyptologists of any
!
pretension had learned to scorn such a petty conception

and had begun to assert entirely new epochs, ranging any-
where between 5,200 and 6,600 years ago. Where-
upon, one-half at least of Sir John Herschel's hitherto
applauded grounds, of confirmation, for his astronomical
date of the Great Pyramid, fell to pieces at once and ;
he was left, with his astronomy alone, in enormous

opposition to, and violent discrepance from, instead of
singular agreement with, the idol-studying Egyptologists
of our universities and museums.
Moreover, as soon as I came to extend Sir John
Herschel's computations, it appeared that when the star
a Draconis, had in a manner chanced to come to that
passage-angle distance from the Pole in about 2160 B.C.,
— itwas from a nearer, instead of a further, polar distance

which the star had previously occupied. In which case,
the said star must have been at some still earlier age
at the passage-angle distance once again. Indeed, instead
of merely approaching the precession circle from the out-
side, it had passed through a small segment of it, and
so made a double appulse but the star's first occasion
;
of being at the Pyramid passage angle distance from

the Pole was earlier still, and had taken place some-
where about 3440 B.C.
Here then was a most divided duty 3440 B.C.
:
might satisfy some of the Neologians among our too

3i6 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
learned Egyptologists of the last ten years, tliougli

certainly not But then, what case could be made
all.
out, independently of all Egyptology of the profane

order, for choosing3440 B.C., as better than 2160 B.C.,
or vice There were no astronomical reasons
versa ?
then known applying to one occasion, more than the

other Colonel Howard- Yyse was dead
; Sir John ;
Herschel remained silent a noisy military man would

;
persist that Sir John now agreed with him in main-

taining that the peculiar passage-angle was chosen for
easy sarcophagus sliding alone and the astronomical
;
world, whatever the reason why, would give the subject

no attention.
The Great Pyramid's Use of a Polar Star.

But there was happily more in the ancient Great
Pyramid than any one had suspected, and it began to
manifest itself thus,
Did not the very entrance passage, chiefly concerned
in the affair, speak by its 50, in place of 100, inch
height, to a half, and not a whole day or a 1 2 -hour ;
interval for some purpose unknown ? And did not the

axis of the passage point, not to the one, central pole
of the sky, where, if visible at all, the upper and lower
culmination of any close polar star would be equally
seen, but to a region of lower culmination only ?
This was indeed the fact and no one had yet asked,
;
" Why did the builders memorialize, out of the two

meridian passages of their circumpolar star in every 24
hours, only the lower, less visible, less important culmin-
ation of the two ?" Neither had any one yet inquired,
" What did any reasonable man, whether of the Pyramid,
or any other, day intend or mean, if time was his object,
by observing the transit, whether above or below the
Pole, of a close circumpolar star and of that kind of ;
star only?"
Chap. XVII.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 3 1
Why sucli a star moves so slowly, by reason of the

!
very small size of its daily circle in the sky, that the
instant of its passing the meridian is difficult to observe
and decide on even with modern telescopic power and ;
no observer in his senses, in any existing observatory,

when seeking to obtain the time, would observe the
transit of a circumpolar star for anything else than to
get the direction of the meridian to adjust his instrument
by. But having done that, he would then turn said
instrument round in the vertical plane of the meridian
so ascertained and observe an equatorial, or at least a
zodiacal, star such star moving diurnally at great speed
:
through the sky, by reason of its large circle extending

through the heavens above, and the heavens below, the
earth. And then such astronomer would obtain the
time with proper accuracy and eminent certainty.
Now to myself, who have been an astronomical transit
observer for a great part of my
immediately
life, it
occurred, that the narrow entrance-passage of the Great

Pyramid directed up northward, looked very like a polar
pointer while the grand gallery rising up southwards
;
at an opposite angle, and with its high walls scored

with long and broad bands, looked amazingly like a
reminder of the equatorial zone though being a closed-
;
in passage it could be only for memorial, and not at all

for observing, astronomy. And as in the meanwhile
my apprentice work in 1865 to the original
daily
builders, by measuring every joint of the stones where-
with they had constructed the Pyramid's interior, had
inevitably led me to see, that wherever there was any
size, shape, or position executed in superior workman-
ship and better quality of stone, there was a reason for
it, —why then I ventured to argue thus,
The ancient architect's reason why the entrance-
passage points to the lower or less important culmina-
tion only of its polar star, a Draconis, is because a more
3i8 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
important star was at the same moment 12 hours

distant from and therefore at its upper culmina-
it ;
tion, or crossing the meridian above the Pole and ;
for chronological purposes such more important star

must be a zodiacal, if not absolutely an equatorial, one.
Was there then at either the date 3440 B.C., or the later
2160 B.C. (at each of which dates, but at no other for
25,000 years, a Draconis was, when crossing the
meridian each day below the Pole, equally at the
entrance-passage angle of height), was there any notable
zodiacal or equatorial star in the general southern direc-
tion of the grand gallery, rather than in the northern
one of the entrance-passage, and crossing the meridian
at that moment high in mid-heaven there ?
Now here was a question put by the Pyramid's actual
construction, and to be answered by astronomy alone or ;
without any of the Egyptologists, with all their lore of

false gods and animal idolatry, having anything to do
with it.
The answer too might have come out, either that
there was no signal zodiacal star in such a position at
either date or there might have been such stars at both
;
dates, and then no discrimination could have been

effected. But the answer that did come out was, that no
such star existed at the circumpolar star's lower transit
of 3440 B.C., but that there was one most eminently
and exactly in position at the 2160 B.C., or rather 2170
B.C., circumpolar transit ; and that well-fitting zodiacal
star was ^ Tauri. (See Plates XIY., XY.)
The Pleiades Year^
. Nowfj Tauri is not a very large or bright star in
but then it is the centre of a group of stars more

itself,
bound up with human history, hopes, and feelings than

any other throughout the sky, viz., the Pleiades and ;
Chap.XVIL] the great pyramid. 319
there have been traditions for long, whence arising I

know not, that the seven overlappings of the grand
gallery, so impressively described by Professor Greaves,
had something to do with the Pleiades, those proverbially
seven stars of the primeval world, though already re-
duced to six (i.e., six visible to the ordinary naked
eye), so early as thetime of the Latin poet Virgil.
Here then is what those overlappings had to do viz., ;
to symbolize the Pleiades in the memorial, not observing,

astronomy of the Pyramid in an earlier day than "Virgil's;
for the Pleiades evidently were, de facto, the superior,
equatorial, or time, star to be taken in concert with the
inferior transit of the circumpolar a Draconis on the
opposite side of the sky. And how well they performed
their part, and how capable they were of it, appeared
from this further result of calculation, that when they,
the Pleiades, crossed the meridian at midnight above
the Pole, while a Draconis was crossing below the Pole,
for the second cosmical occasion, at the particular dis-
tance fromi the Pole indicated by the entrance-passage, —
that night was the evening, or autumnal, beginning of
the primeval year, and because the Pleiades were then
at 0^ right ascension, or in the celestial meridian of
the equinoctial point. Or again, they were by the same
fact at the commencement of that grand celestial cycle
of the precession of the equinoxes, wherein and whereby
they are destined, in apparent movement, to progress
onward and onward at the rate of a little more than 3
seconds of time in a year, until after not less than 25,827
years they return to the same position again.
This grand quantity, or peculiar celestial cycle, is
further Pyramidically defined by, amongst other inten-

tional features, the length of the diagonals of the base,
which so eminently lay out the whole Great Pyramid's
position when their sum is reckoned up in inches, at
;
the rate of a Pyramid inch to a year.

320 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part TV.
In the little portion of history which is all that

modern astronomy can claim to have flourished in, the
following are some of the principal determinations of
this period of the precession of the equinoxes :
By Tycho Brahe = 25,816 years.

„ Ricciolus = 25,920 „
„ Cassini = 24,800 „
„ Bradley = 25,740 „
„ Bessel = 25,868 „
No one whatever amongst men, from his own, or
school, knowledge knew anything about such a pheno-
menon until Hipparchus, some 1,900 years after the
Great Pyramid's foundation, had a glimpse of the fact
— and yet it had been ruling the heavens for ages, and
was recorded in Jeezeh's ancient structure.
Virgil, 200 years later still than Hipparchus, just as
might be expected of a poet, was greater in tradition
than astronomical observation and when he uses the
;
phrase,* that it is " the constellation of the white Bull
with the golden horns, which opens the year," many of

our own scientific commentators have wondered what
Roman Yirgil could mean, by claiming as a phenomenon
for his own day, that which the precession of the
Equinoxes had caused to cease to be true 2,000 years
before his time, and had given to Aries instead.
No profane philosopher or academic observer of any
country in the world is known to have lived at the epoch
when that Yirgilian phrase about Taurus was true.
How and wherefore then came such an appearance of
the heavens, true only in the Pyramid's age, to become
fixed in the minds of the Romans, and Etruscans too,
not themselves much given to observing science of
any kind, twenty centuries ? How also came it
for
about, according to the documents collected with so
much rare skill and research (and partially published
* Candidus auratis aperit cum cornibus ani.um Taurus.

Chap. XVII.] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 31 1
many years ago) by Mr. R. G. Haliburton, of Halifax,

Nova Scotia, that amongst the origines of almost all
nations, and among many unaltered savage tribes still,

such as Australians, Fijians, Mexicans, and many others
(peoples never reached by the Romans), a similar
beginning of the year to that described by Yu'gil
is still perpetuated the Pleiades, or the star group
;
chiefly characterising the constellation of the Bull, being

annually appealed to and in Australia, most strange
;
to say, by Pyramid method, in so far that

precisely the
the natives there begin their year on the night when
" they see most of the Pleiades ;" otherwise, when they
continue to see them all the night through, from their

rising at sunset to their setting at sunrise and that ;
must be when they, the Pleiades, cross the meridian at

midnight.
But, just as the Romans stuck to those stars in them-
selves alone, and saw not that they had left the fiducial
test of the equinoctial point by 30°, —
so the Australians
stick to them still, implicitly, not seeing that the same
point is now 5 4° removed from them and that the
;
Pleiades stars themselves, from the effect of 4,000 years

of precession, never tww rise high in those southern
skies. But that is a test, in so far, of when those
peoples first received that system of sidereal chronology
to hold, which is only found in all its completeness,
and with testimony as to the date of its beginning, and
fitness then for all inhabited lands, laid up in the Great
Pyramid building. (See Plates XV. and XVI.)
Transcendentalisms of the Great Pyramid Astronomy.
Now the only source from whence one uniform system

of sidereal chronology, and which, though endued with
a change in respect to the seasons, yet changes so slowly
year by year and generation after generation as to
Y
require 25,000 years before it passes througli all the

seasons, — the only source, I say, from whence it could
have emanated in that early age of the world, and been
impressed upon the origines of all races of mankind, is,
was, and can only be. Divine inspiration. Not the in-
fallible Divine power in itself that would have created
:
stars for such purpose alone and then they would

;
have been absolutely perfect for such end but Divine :
inspiration accorded to more or less fallible men.

Here, accordingly, what we are called upon to
observe, may rather remind one of that which Josephus
records of the descendants of Seth, viz., that they studied
astronomy of themselves first, though eventually under
the approval of, and with some peculiar assistance from,
the Almighty. The Sethites then, as men, only sought
to make the best use, and turn to the most practical
account, whatever was already created and existing in
the sky, in the shape of stars suitable for observa-
tion: — and which stars we shall find, in the present
day, on pushing both observation and calculations to
the extreme of modern science, were by no means in
themselves absolutely perfect. The orbs of heaven had
indeed been created long before the foundation of the
Great Pyramid, and doubtless for many "other purposes
than defining the Pleiades year to mankind upon
earth. But, take those stars 4,000 years ago, as they had
been already set in motion by the Divine power seons
on seons of ages before the Pyramid day, —
and you will
find that they did, at that epoch, come quite near
enough to form an excellent practical chronological
system of the kind indicated and no better mode of
;
utilizing those actual phenomena of the starry sky, nor

any better choice among the stars, ever has been
i'nagined since then, in any country of the world.
Thus, to moderate observation (and with far greater
accuracy than the annals of profane history of mankind
Chap. XVH.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 323
have been kept to), all these hereinafter following fea-

tures may be said, in ordinary terms, to obtain ;
1. Tlie Great Pyramid is astronomically oriented in

its sides ; and its passages are in the plane of
the meridian.
2. The entrance-passage points
, 3° 42' vertically
below the Pole of the sky.
3. In the year 2170 B.C. a Draconis was 3° 42' from
the Pole of the sky, and therefore looked right
down the axis of the entrance-passage, when at
its lowest culmination.
4. When a Draconis was so looking down the
entrance-passage, 'y] Tauri, the chief star in the
Pleiades group, was crossing the local terrestrial
meridian, at a point high up in the sky, near
the equator, and simultaneously with the celes-
tialmeridian of the vernal equinox.
5. That whole stellar combination had not taken
place for 25,000 years previously, and will not
take place again for 25,000 years subsequently.
It has not consequently repeated itself yet in all
the history of the human race, as the Sothiac
Phoenix cycle and other chronological
cycle, the
inventions of the profane Egyptian priests, long
after the Pyramid day, have done again and
again, to the lamentable confusion of dates in
the Pagan world.
But if the calculations on which the above Pyramid

results are founded, shall be pushed to much greater
refinement, or to the
portions of space invisible to
naked eye, —
then appears that (1) the Pole-star, when
it
it was 3° 42' from the Pole,

(2) the equatorial star
opposite to it, and (3) the celestial meridian of the
equinox, were not all of them on the Pyramid's meri-
dian, below and above the Pole, 'precisely at the same

instant, either in the year 2170 B.C., or in any other
year ; and this from failure of the physical stars to be
mathematically accurate.
But OUT present difficulty is not by any means entirely
confined to the stars, in their places, not being as exact
as if they had been created originally for no other than
the above purpose ; for there are hindrances also to
modern astronomy, in precisely realizing everything
that has taken place in Nature during the last 4,000
years. Two astronomers, for instance, using the same
data, may compute back the place of a given star 4,000
years ago from its present place, and they shall agree
to a second in the result ; but it does not therefore follow
that the star was as precisely there at that time, as though
a contemporary chronologist had observed it then for ;
proper motion, and variations of proper motion, may

exist, quite unknown to the short period of surveillance
over the stars yet enjoyed by modern astronomy, and
totally overturning the physical accuracy of the calcu-
lations. Some of the quantities, too, of the celestial
mechanics concerned, such as the precise amount of the
very precession of the equinoxes itself,. may have been
erroneously assumed, and never can be ascertained per-
fectly by man. The numerical values of such quantities
do, in fact, vary at the same time between one astro-
nomer and another (unless both were brought up in the
same school), and also from one generation to another
of astronomers at different times just as most of the ;
living directors of Observatories are disputing at this

present moment what is the precise distance of
as to
the earth from the sun and all of them differ, even by
;
a large total quantity, from what all their brethren, and

themselves too, used to hold only twenty years ago.
After, therefore, doing my best with the Pyramid star
calcidations, and publishing my result, together with a
Chap. XVIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 325
repetition of Sir John Hersdiel's, so far as it went, I

advertised, after a manner, in the name of science, for
help from other astronomers, — in the way of each of
them computing the whole of the quantities with the
data he now thinks best, and also with the data most
approved in the astronomical world of his youth, as well
as with the quantities thought correct at theend of the
last century.
But none of them have ventured to expose to modem
society the weaknesses of their favourite science, mul-
tiplied by 4,000 years ; and I should have been left
without anything whatever to show from other modern

quarters, but for the kindness of Dr. Briinnow, Astro-
nomer-Royal for Ireland, who, kindly and without
needing any second asking, performed the first part of
my request that is, with the quantities which he now
:
thinks should be adopted as correct, he most ably, and

by special methods of astronomy which no one in all
the world understands better than himself, computed
the following numbers :
(1) a Draconis was for the first time at the distance of

3^ 41' 50" from the Pole in the year . . . = 3443 B.C.
(2) Itwas at the least distance from the Pole, or 0° 3' 25",
in the year = 2790 „
(3) It was for the second time at the distance of 3° 41' 42"
from the Pole in the year = 2136 „
(4) If Tauri (Alcyone of the Pleiades) was in the same
right ascension as the equinoctial point in the year = 2248 „
when it crossed the meridian above the Pole, 3^ 47'
north of the Equator, with a Draconis crossing below
the Pole, nearly, but not exactly, at the same
instant, and 3° 3' from the Polar point.
(5) a Draconis and r\ Tauri were exactly opposite to each
other, so that one of them could be on the meridian
above the Pole, and the other on the meridian below
the Pole, at the same absolute instant, only at the
date of = 1674 „
but when all the other data diverged largely.
We
have now to deal with the three last dates. Of
these three, the two first evidently include between
them my own previous mean quantity of 2170 B.C.
but tlie third differs extravagantly. Nevertheless, the

visible effect in thesky of that one apparently very large
difference in absolute date, is merely this, according to
Dr. Brlinnow's computation viz., that when
; Tauri,
'v]
or the Pleiades, were crossing the meridian above the

Pole, at my Pyramid date of 2170 B.C., a Draconis was
not doing the same thing, exactly beneath the Pole, at
the same instant for the star was then at the distance
;
of 0° VI ' west of the meridian. But it would have been

doing the same thing perfectly, according to an entrance-
passage observation of it, if the northern end of that
passage had been made to trend 17' westward, still
keeping to its observed angular height in the vertical
plane viz., 26° 18'.
;
Whereupon comes the question whether, —granting

temporarily that Dr. Briinnow's excellent calculations in
modern astronomy replace everything that has happened
in Nature during the last 4,000 years,^ —whether that
17' of the Pole-star's west distance from the meridian
was a thing of moment —
and if so, is this the first
;
occasion on which it has been discovered ?
Seventeen minutes of space, or less than the thousandth

part of the azimuthal scale, is but a small quantity for
any one to appreciate in all the round of the blue
expanse, without instruments and the first effort of
;
Greek astronomy 1,800 years after the Pyramid was

built, is reported to have been the discovery that the
Pole-star of that day, then 6 degrees from the Pole,
was not as they, the Greeks, had previously held, exactly
on the Pole.
Greek and other profane nations, then, had been in
the habit of overlooking, long, long after the epoch of
the Pyramid, an error twenty times as great as this
which is charged on the Great Pyramid astronomy by
the science of precision which has now been elaborated
amongst men after a lapse of 4,000 years.
Chap. XVII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 327
And yetwas not all error either, on the part of the

it
Great Pyramid. For here we should take account of

the result of my observations in 1865, when I succeeded
in comparing the directions of both the outside of the
Pyramid, the axis of the entrance-passage, and the axis
of the azimuth trenches"'" separately and successively
with the Polar star. These observations were made
with a powerful altitude-azimuth instrument, reading off
its angles with micrometer-microscopes to tenths of
seconds and the results were, that everything trended
;
at its northend towards the west, —

the azimuth trenches
by 1 9 minutes, the socket-sides of the base by 5 minutes,
and the axis of the entrance passage by more nearly 4
minutes and a half
What could all these features have been laid out for
with this slight tendency to west of north ? was a
question which I frequently pondered over at the Great
Pyramid, and sometimes even accused the earth's sur-
face of having shifted with respect to its axis of rotation
during 4,000 years. But now the true explanation
would appear to be, that the Seth-descended architect,
knowing perfectly well the want of exact correspondence
between his polar and equatorial stars (though they
were the best in the sky), had so adjusted in a minute
degree the position of the Great Pyramid when building
it, as to reduce any error in his Pleiades system of
chronology, arising out of the stellar discrepance, to a
minrnium. Whence the fact of the western divergence
of the north pointing of the entrance-passage as detected
by the modemastronomy observations in 1865, com-
bined with the computation in 1871, becomes the most —
convincing practical proof of intention, and not accident,
having guided all these time-arrangements at the Great
Pyramid.
• See " Life and Work," vol. ii. pp. 185 to 196.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MOSES AND THE WISDOM OF THE EGYPTIANS.
IN the circles of those very learned men in modern

society who go on continually studying the idolatrous
contents of the Egyptian galleries in the British, and
other, museums (and are known as hierologists, hiero-
glyphiologists, Egyptologists, anti-Biblical archaeologists,
&c.), are found the doughtiest of those champions who
are so ready in these days to insist, that "whereas
Genesis was written by Moses, and Moses was for many
years of his life a priest among the Egyptians, who were
a wealthy and civilized nation when the progenitors of
the Israelites were still merely wandering shepherds,
always on the verge of starvation ; while moreover,
according to the New Testament itself (Acts vii. 22),
Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,"
— that therefore Moses must have copied all the best
things he has put into Genesis, and his other books
also, from those deeply wise instructors he had lived
with for forty years, viz., the Egyptian priests.
On this question, much
defence of the Divine in-
spiration, versus Egyptian education, of the re-
the
sponsible author of the Pentateuch has been written in
the world, from the literary side but not always with
;
so much special point as might have been done from

the mechanical, or rather the scientific, point of view.
Mere literature, for instance, is nonplussed at once
Chap. XVIIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 329
by the hierologists when they contend with positivism,

by methods where classic book-learning is powerless, for
a civilized Egypt during 13,000 years and more; some
of them even mounting up to 300,000 years, and
declaring that they are just as firmly convinced of its
history so obtained (and therefore of the gradual
human growth, and natural progressive development of
all that knowledge, utilized at last so happily by
Moses) as of any event in English history under the
reigns of the Stuarts. These men also allege points of
community between the laws Moses and those of
of
ancient Egypt; which laws they say he must have
read, because they were actually written and in books
long before his time, together with a vast amount of
literature, including even novels, and something very
like the story of Joseph, in the highly-polished society
flourishing, according to them from time truly imme-
morial, on the quiet banks of the Nile.
The refuge here (and in so far, a very proper one)
of the Biblical literary men, seems to be chiefly, that
those tremendous hierologist and Egyptologist dates
have never been proved to the satisfaction of others
than the dangerous, if not soi-disant, hierologists
themselves while, as for the points of community, or
;
rather, merely similar complexion, between the Egjrp-

tian and the Mosaic laws, they exist only in certain
subsidiary forms required for social order and political
independence and are such as a common human
;
nature, with a like geographical position, chronological

epoch, and from Babel, would
traditional information
have infallibly produced, more or
less, amongst any
set of people endowed with brains, and some little

desire to amend their position in the world. And then
there comes also, to every real believer in the funda-
mental doctrine of Christianity, this further and
grander result, flowing from a philosophical investiga-
tion of the two systems as wholes ; viz., that the real

essence of the Mosaic law is as totally distinct from
that of the Egyptian, as any two antagonisms in the
world of man can possibly be. For while they are both
founded on, and for, religion, —
the Egyptian system
bases on Cainite assertions and re-assertions of self-
righteousness, and a multitude of gods, half animal
—
and half man some of them, too, not a little obscene
(to an extent w^hich makes us wonder at several modern
European governments reproducing their portraits one
after the other in costly folios and large-sized plates,
for the information of the public of the present day),
who is there, of those who have felt the saving grace
of Christ's sacrifice, who cannot see, as the ruling prin-
ciple in Moses, the most magnificent, and particular,
rebellion against all that would-be power of man. in
the high places of the earth and a grand assertion
;
both of the one, true, and only living God, the Creator
of all things, and the sinfulness of man in His sight ?
The holy zeal, too, of Moses, and his earnest self-
sacrificing for the cause of God, and his anxiety to
show Him at once accessible by prayer, through an
appointed method of sin-offering and mediation to every
one both rich and poor, are the liveliest contrasts that
can well be imagined to the sordid routine of an
Egyptian priesthood, placing itself immovably, for its
own gain, between the people and their gods, such as
they were.
Of the Number Five.
But the most decided overthrow of the modern

hierologists comes involuntarily from themselves, when
they attempt to handle the mechanical part of the
question for, to a great extent, what they, the hiero-
;
logists, have long been contending for, and have suc-

ceeded at last in proving, — is precisely that which
enables us to say most positively tliat a cubit measuring-
rod of the Mosaic, and Newton-proved, length of 25

Pyramid inches, and which has such extraordinary
scientific value in its earth-axis commensurability, and
was made so much of by Moses in the Tabernacle of
the Wilderness, — was no part or parcel of the wisdom
of the profane Egyptians during any portion of their
historical career; and could not, therefore, have been
learned or borrowed from them by any one.
And though the best ethnological theory of the
Eg3^ptians be that which makes them, not Ethiopians
descending the Nile from the interior of Africa, nor
Indian Aryans migrating by sea from Bombay, but
Asiatics and Caucasians entering by the Isthmus of Suez
into Lower Egypt, and ascending the course of the river
— there seems no reason whatever to conclude that
they had previously, wherever their previous existence
had been passed, either received or adopted that peculiar
measure of 2 5 inches, which Sir Isaac Newton considers
the Israelites possessed, long before their going down
into Egypt.
Not only, too, may it be further said, from this cubit-
measure side of the question, that recent researches have
proved the astonishing vitality of standards of measure
through enormous intervals of time and that an invo-
;
luntary change of a people's standard from the Egyptian

20 7 to the Hebrew and Pyramid 2 5 inches, or vice
versa, was never yet seen in the history of the world ;
but it may be argued, that the ancient Egyptians,

whatever faults they may have had, were both politically
and socially a most conservative, methodical, and or-
derly people, with an immense taste for mechanics, and
a marvellous appreciation of measure ; so that they
would be the last nation in the world, let alone their
religious ideas on the topic, to lose or mistake their
hereditary standards. In fact, one of the chief accusa-
tions which a French writer brings against those

late
ancient Egyptians that they had no genius, no in-
is,
vention that they were only dull plodders at routine

;
work and, besides never having had a great poet or a

;
great warrior, they were actually so low in the scale of

humanity, as never to have had a revolutionist of any
kind or degree amongst them.
We may therefore with perfect safety, and hierolo-
gists' support too, regard the length of 20 '7 inches as
the veritable and admitted hereditary measure of all
Pharaonic Egyptians and the one which, if they had

;
been copied from by any other nation or mere indi-

vidual, would have been the length imitated and faith-
fully reproduced.
Moses, consequently, in making the distinguished use
which he did, not of that length of 20*7, but of the
very different length of 25 inches, was decidedly not
taking anything out of the known wisdom-book of the
Egyptians or anything which their amount and species
;
of learning would have enabled them intentionally to

arrive at and perceive the cosmical virtues of.
And not only so, too ; for if, with the absolute
length of the Pyramid standard, Moses adopted its
Pyramidic sub-division also into 5x5 parts, he was
adopting something which was particularly hateful to
the Egyptians. Why it was so, does not appear but ;
Sir Gardner Wilkinson speaks of 5 as being the " evil

number " in Modern Egypt * still it is marked by ;
on their watches and 5 x 5, or anything made up of

;
5, would seem to have been always repulsive there.

Particularly galling, therefore, to the old Egyptians it
must have been to have seen the Israelites, when they

escaped from bondage and went out of the country
**with an high hand," itself a symbol of 5, especially —
* Murray's 1864 " Handbook for Egypt," p. 142.
CHAP.XVm.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 333
galling to their spirits to see their late slaves go up,

marshalled by " 5 in a rank," out of the land of Egypt
for so is the literal translation of the word expressed
''
harnessed," in Exodus 18 of the English Bible.
xiii.
The whole of that affair must, no doubt, have been

hateful, as well as disastrous, to the Egyptians and ;
they indulged themselves afterwards in some very con-

temptuous phrases about it. They said, for instance, as
appears from the relics of Manetho,* handed down to us
from various authors, that some persons, under a rene-
gade priest of Heliopolis named " Moyses," had been
thrust out of Egypt by the king and they were a very
;
abominable set indeed, for not only were they all lepers
and unclean, but their number is given as the very evil
one of 250,000, or 5 x 50,000.
Their real number is given by the Bible as soraething
very different from this, as well as their state but it ;
was a mode of blackening them to the Egyptians for

Egyptian purposes in more ways than one and simi- ;
larly, when the ** Hyksos," or "Shepherd Kings," t also

much abominated by the Egyptians, established them-
selves in Avaris, in a remarkably inconvenient manner
to Egyptian polity, they were described as men "of an
ignoble race," and in number also " 250,000."
Of the Book of Job,
But Moses had none of this unwise and anti-Pyramid

hatred of 5 and times of 5 and though his first
;
arrangement of years was the Sabbatical one of a "week

of years," his next, and by far the most important one,
the grand standard, in fact, of sacred time, was the
jubilee of 5x10 years ; a number wliich, with the
• " Penny Cyclopa5dia," p. 118.

t Gliddon's "Ancient Egypt," p. 63.
similar arrangement of days for the feast of Pentecost,

brings up again the number of inches frequently
referred to an important standard in the King's
as
Chamber and the passages of the Great Pyramid.
It is also worthy of note, that the whole of the sacred
law was arranged on a system of five books five, too,
;
expressly so called in the " Pentateuch ;*' and this over-

shadowing of Israel, in this place, by the number 5,
seems even to have had some special intention in it.
For when the best critics have pronounced so decidedly
as they have done, and on completely other grounds,
that the Book of Job was cither completely written, or
finally put into its present shape, by Moses, and by no
one else, in spite of some modern theories, —
yet cannot
find the smallest reason for its anomalous position in the
Bible, far away from all the other books of the same
—
inspired writer, it may be suggested that one reason was,
to prevent the unity and proportions of the five books
of the '' Pentateuch," as a system and symbol of 5, being
interfered with.
Each of the books of the " Pentateuch " depends on
the other or, at least, Deuteronomy refers to Exodus,
;
Leviticus, and Numbers, and they refer to Genesis but ;
not one of them refers to Job, and Job does not refer to
any of them.
Yet surely the Bible itself would have been incom-
plete without the Book of Job, and all its lessons of
supreme piety, humility, and wisdom. In the " Penta-
teuch," somewhat fettered to a particular purpose, the
full genius of Moses and the whole of the wisdom he
was privileged to receive from on high, had not their
full range but in the Book of Job there came an
;
opportunity, which was not lost or slighted, of alluding

more clearly to the immortality of the soul, and the
necessity of a divine redemption.
Again, to return to more moderate subjects, it was
Chap. XVIII.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 335
not till lately that any one scientifically understood, and

thoroughly appreciated, the full tenor of some of the
concluding passages of that remarkable book. In Job
xxxviii., the Lord, "with whom is terrible majesty,"
proceeds to answer Job out of the whirlwind confound- ;
ing him in a moment with the grandeur of elemental

phenomena, the form and size of the earth, the laws
of solids and fluids, of light and darkness, of sea and
air, of clouds, sunshine, rain, frost, and lightning the ;
series of wonders is appalling, their magnitude and

duration verging on the infinite. But then, though
softened by a gradation of truest descriptions of the
tender herb springing forth all the wide world over,
there had seemed, to every exact scientist's ideas, some-
thing like a descent from sublimity, in the Biblical
account coming down to, and concluding with, a de-
scription of two or three particular animals.
What the Egyptian wisdom, with its infantile know-
ledge of physical science anjj cosmical relations would
have said to that, is hardly worth a serious inquiry
but this is what modem wisdom in the scientific age of
the earth has involuntarily illustrated very lately, or in
the last-published number of one of those large book-sized
Reviews, which undertake to show existing intellectual
society, through the medium of the ablest writers, what-
ever the best minds have been producing within the
latestfew months of time.
The author reviewed on the occasion alluded to,
treated of the new science of thermo-dynamics show- ;
ing that heat is a form of motion ; and, from that simple

beginning, enumerating the laws of the earth's atmo-
sphere, and the medium filling space calculating the
;
and chemical work still in the

store of useful mechanical
world predicting the duration of sun, moon, and all
;
material things and then boasting, quite in the pro-

;
fane Egyptian manner, that now that this new prin-

336 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pabt IV.
ciple in natural philosophy — i.e., mere solar radiation,

computed by a particular formula — is proved to be
the one principle which supports everything we see,
that may be said to "create the muscle and build
it
the brain of man to be heard in the roar of the lion,

;
and the song of birds ; is seen in the gliding of the

serpent," &c., &c.
Whereupon comes down the reviewer, with a higher
philosophy and more religious truth, regretting that
the author does not see that, to whatever extent he
can compute some few changes in the form of mere
dead matter, or inorganic elements, —
extending though
they may through space, —
he has not made the smallest
approach to accounting for a single organic phseno-
menon the mystery of life is left wholly untouched
:
by him so is any attempt, even, at an explanation

;
of how fibre is joined to fibre in the animal structure

and infinitely more, wise Job's idea, '* how wisdom is
put into the inner part^," and by what means the
different created beings take up their appointed cha-
racters in life's varied drama.
In fact, the best and latest of modern science has here
represented the difficulties of nature for man to explain,
to be culminating, precisely in the manner they were
described to do, in the sacred Book of Job 4,000 years
ago.
Moses, then, in that inimitable work, instead of copy-
ing anything from the profane Egyptians of his day, was
rather anticipating the march of science in the Christian
ages of the world. And when we further find that in
other important things, he was likewise going directly
against the standards of the Egyptians, but coincidently
with those of the Kosmos of God and the Great Pyra-
mid ; Pyramid
of those inner parts, too, of the Great
which the Egyptians knew nothing about, and which
he, Moses, as a man, could never have seen when we —
CHAP.XVm.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 337
meet with all these telling circumstances, and so many

parallel featuresbetween the inspired writings and the
Great Pyramid versus all Egypt, it certainly would
appear that we must be coming close to the Biblical
source of the wisdom of that mighty fabric.
Yet there are some additional points of contact be-
tween the Great Pyramid and Mosaic metrological sys-
tems, which it will be well worth our while to study
in their detail, before venturing to proceed further
with the grand question of the whole.
Of the Sacred Ark of the Covenant
The length of the Great Pyramid's cubit having been

25 02 5 British inches cannot, I presume, now be re-
sisted ; and to all minds capable of grasping the sub-
Newton's testimony for the Mosaic cubit
ject, Sir Isaac
having also been close to that length, is probably equally
conclusive ;
yet at the same time, these able minds may
desire to hear, any further direct Biblical
if there is
evidence for that end, over and above what Sir Isaac
Newton adduced in his invaluable Dissertation ? Now
something of this sort there does appear to be in the
Pentateuch's account of the Ark of the Covenant, the
most sacred feature of the whole of the Tabernacle's
arrangement under Moses.
That Ark was kept in the Holiest of Holies, occupied
its chief place of honour, and was never to be looked
on by any but the High Priest alone, even during a

journey. Near it was placed an ephah measure and ;
immediately outside its compartment, as Michaelis has

shown, were various other standards of measure ;
though no metrological purpose, that I am aware of,

has been hitherto assigned to the Ark itself
As its original name, " area," implies, the Ark was a
box or chest and its first-stated purpose as such was,
;
z
to hold the Divine autograph of the law written on

stone.
This Ark-box, then, made
of shittim, or acacia, wood,
was further anything attached to it was
lidless, so far as
concerned though a crown of gold was afterwards

;
added round about the rim, and a separate or loose lid

was made for it of pure gold, called the mercy-seat.
—
The 'actual seat, however said to be occasionally occu-
pied as a throne, by an expression of the Divine
presence —
was not that lid, but was formed by the
wings of two angels, constructed in gold at either end
of the lid which lid, at such time, together with the
;
Ark below, then formed Xkud footstool. ^^

With the lower part only of this arrangement, or the
Ark itself, have we now to do and the Ark, on'its loose
;
lid of gold being removed, was merely a box —

a lidless,
rectangular, rectilinear box, made of a hard and tough
wood common to the hills of Sinai.
Now there was nothing new or peculiar in
in so far,
this arrangement of Moses for of boxes there was an

;
abundance in the world, even in the very temples of

Egypt, when time had waxed so late in human history
as 1500 B.C. In fact, those very purposes of "rapacity,"
in subservience to which Josephus relates that Cain
invented weights and measures, would seem to require
that he should have made big and strong chests, as
treasuries wherein to keep the fruits of his spoliation
and oppression as well as the stone strongholds, banks,
;
or ''oers," of which more presently, for the -custody of

the said chests.
The only feature, therefore, of distinctive importance
* " The or cover of the ark was of the same length and breadth, and
lid,
made of the purest gold. Over it, at the two extremities, were two
cherubim, with their ibur faces turned towards each other, and inclined a
little towards the lid (otherwise called the mercy-seat). Their wings,
which were spread out over the top of the ark, formed the throne of God,
the King of Israel, while the ark itself was the footstool." (Exodus xxv.
10—22; XXX vii. 1— 9.)— Kitto's *' Bible Cyclopsedia," p. 214.
Chap. XYTIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 339
which we need expect to find in the particular box con-

structed by Moses for a sacred purpose, should be some-
thing akin to that which distinguished his sacred cubit,
from the profane cubit of the Egyptians mere measur-
:
ing sticks, both of them and yet one, not only of a

;
different length to the other, but implying by that

difference a commensurability with the Divinely grand
in nature, far too difficult for man to have discovered
for himself in that age. Now the size of that Ark-box
of Moses is given in Holy Scripture as being, 2-5 cubits
long, and 1 '5 cubits broad, and 1 '5 high which mea- ;
sures being reduced to Pyramid inches, on Sir Isaac

Newton's and our own, evolution of the sacred cubit
of Moses, = 62*5 x 37'5 x 37'5 of those inches.
But was this outside measure or inside measure ? for
that must make a very material difference in the cubical
result.
Outside measure, without a doubt, and for the two
following reasons :
1st. Because the vertical component is spoken of as

height, and not depth.
2nd. Because the lower lid of gold, or the mercy-
seat, being made only of the swme stated length and
breadth as the Ark itself, it would have stood insecure,
and run a chance of tumbling down to the bottom of
the box, if that length and breadth had signified the
top of the box's inside, and not its outside, area.
Hence, with the true length of the sacred cubit
many ages of error), and the above
(obtained after so
understanding how to apply it, we may now approach
the cubical contents of the Ark. We are not, indeed,
informed in Scripture what was the thickness of the
sides, and therefore do not know exactly how much to
subtract from the outside, to give the inside dimen-
sions but the outside having been given, and the
;
material stated, the limits within which such tliickness

must be found, arc left very narrow indeed. Let the

thickness, for instance, assumed 1*8 Pyramid
be
inches then
; the length, breadth, and depth will be
reduced from an outside of 62-5 x 37'5 x 37*5 to an
inside of 58-9 x 33-9 x 357 which gives 71,282 cubic
;
inches for the capacity contents of this open box with-

out a lid.
Or, if we consider the sides and ends 1*75 inch

thick, and the bottom 2 inches, — also very fair propor-
tions in carpentry for such a sized box in such a
quality of wood, — then its inside measure would be
59*0 X 34 '0 X 35 -5which yield for the cubical con-
;
tents 71,213 cubic Pyramid inches.

Thus, in any mode almost of practically constructing
the Ark-box, on both the name and number data given
by the Bible, and the Hebrew cubit value first
approached by Sir Isaac Newton, we cannot avoid
bringing out a cubical capacity result almost identical
with that of a still older box, known for several cen-
turies past to moderns as a lidless box, but never
known at all to the ancient Egyptians ; viz., the coffer
in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid.
Wherefore, with that coffer's cubic capacity, the Ark
of the Covenant immediately acquires all the commen-
surabilities of that coffer's interior with the capacity
and mean density of the earth whole a some-
as a :
thing both utterly distinguishing it from any profane

Egyptian box yet measured and most appropriate to
;
the Scripture-stated use of the Ark under circumstances

of Divine presence, as a footstool ; agreeably with the
words of the Lord in Isaiah and Acts, " the earth is my
footstool."
Of Solomons Molten Sea.
Such, then, looked at in the light of science, 3,300

years after its day of construction, must have been the
^
sacred Ark of the Covenant built according to the in-

spiration commands received by Moses, after he had
left Egypt for ever ;
—
and that was the Ark which
subsequently overthrew the idol gods of the Philistines,
and was a source of safety to Israel on many and many
a national occasion. Yet what eventually became of it,
or what was its latter end, Scripture does not inform us.
The Eastern Churches have their traditions, but I do not
care to occupy time over theifn. And this only further
piece of solid information has been made out by the
metrological researches of John Taylor and others in
recent years ; viz., that within narrow limits pf un-
certainty, the brazen lavers of Solomon's TempFe were
also of the same cubic capacity as the coffer in the
Great Pyramid and measured, on the Hebrew system,
;
40 baths, or 4 homers. Those lavers, then, through

the coffer, were —
what no human science could have
intentionally made them in that day earth com- —
mensurable.
But there was a still larger capacity vessel in the same
Temple of Solomon was it also, earth commensurable,
;
and harmonious with the world of God's creation ?

This vessel, by name the Molten Sea," was grandly
**
cast in bronze, though of a shape and size which has

defied all essayists hitherto to agree upon. Even in
the Bible, something of what is there said about it, is
stated variously in different books thereof ; as that in
Kings, the cubic contents are given as 2,000 baths,
while in Chronicles they are set down as 3,000. The
latter account being but fragmentary, I adhere to the
former and then find, according to the simple state-
;
ment in baths, that the " Molten Sea " would have
contained the contents of a laver 50 times ; or a
Pyramid number at once.
Next we are told (1 Kings vii. 23 26) that —
the " molten sea " " was ten cubits from the one brim
to tlie other ; it was round all about, and his height

was five cubits ; and a line of thirty cubits did compass
it round about ; and it was an hand-breadth thick."
The first point here, is to realise the shape. Some
good men have imagined it cylindrical some of a ;
swelling caldron form ; but the greater numbers, a hemi-

spherical shape and this, perhaps, is most agreeable
;
(1) to the phrase

" round all about," (2) to its diameter
being twice its height, and (3) to the traditionary tes-
timony of Josephus that it was hemispherical.
This point settled, are the measures inside, or out-
side ? By the rule established for the Ark, the breadth
and height are outside, of course but in that case, ;
what is the meaning of a circle of 1 cubits in diameter,

having a circumference of 30 cubits ? That is a total
impossibility and wholly against the chief part of the
;
teaching of the Great Pyramid itself, which proves in

various ways that the circumference of a circle having
10 for diameter cannot be less than 31*4159, &c.
In this dilemma, I venture to conclude (especially as
here an indication of the thickness of the vessel is given,
viz., at a hand-breadth) that the inside circumference
was alluded to.
Take, then, a hemisphere with an inside circum-

ference Pyramid cubits, its diameter would be
of 30
238*73 Pyramid inches, giving, with an outside diameter
of ten cubits, nearly 5-5 inches for the thickness (or a
space which the hand of a strong man spread out would
easily cross).The cubic contents, then, of such internal
hemisphere will be 3,562,070 Pyramid cubic inches ;
and divided by the Pyramid number 50, give 71,241 of

the same cubic inches i.e., within a seven-thousandth
;
part of the same, as either the Ark of the Covenant or

the coffer of the Great Pyramid.
But why did Solomon go to such pains and expense
in making the *'
molten sea " so ver}^ much larger thi
1
Chap.XVIJI.] the great pyramid. 343
his already large brazen vessels, the layers and larger ;
too, by the exact multiple of 50 ?

No profane Egyptian would have chosen that number,
as we have already seen but in the Great Pyramid,
;
planned certainly by a Seth-descended, Abel-following,

God-inspired, man, and by no Cainite Egyptian, the —
lower course of the King's Chamber has been so ad-
justed in height, by the removal from sight of its lower
5 inches, that the cubic contents of that lower course
amount, as already shown at p. 150, to 50 times the
coffer's contents ; or, as we now see,were exactly equal
to the contents of Solomon's molten sea unless we ;
should rather say that Solomon's molten sea was made

to be equal to the lower adjusted course of the King's
Chamber of the Great Pjrramid.
Yet if we have been
already obliged to conclude that
Moses, though he lived long in Egypt, could never have
been inside the Great Pyramid, and had, therefore, no
opportunity of humanly copying the cubic contents of
the coffer; vastly more certain may we be that King
Solomon was never inside the Pyramid either, or in a
position to note the exact amount of cubic contents of
the lower course of the coffer's containing chamber.
Whence, then, came the metrological ideas common to
three individuals in three different ages and involving ;
reference to deep cosmical attributes of the earth, under-

stood by the best and highest of human learning at
none of those times ? And the answer can hardly be
other, than that the God of Israel, who liveth for ever,
equally inspired t© this end the Seth-descended architect
of the Great Pyramid, the prophet Moses, and King
Solomon.
Of Stone Sanctuatâ and Pyramids.

So far, for the vessels contained in the several
sanctuaries, whether Pyramid, Tabernacle, or Temple.
But something now requires to be said, touching these

sanctuaries themselves ; and chiefly on account of the
new light thrown on them by Mr. Henry Tompkins.*
The chief instrument with which he voluntarily
works, is indeed linguistic only, and therefore rather
outside my methods of procedure but involuntarily
;
he brings to bear certain necessary business features

essential to the very existence of any, and every, com-
munity of men, whether large or small. All such, for
instance, must have amongst them, in whatever age
they live or have lived, something approaching to a
safe, or treasure-stronghold even, and perhaps much
;
more so, if they be a community of robbers, rather

than of peaceful men.
Now the first builder of such a safe, according to
this new author, was Cain and Moses told us of it
;
long ago, though bad translations have hid the fact

from our eyes, by speaking rather of " the city " which
Cain built in the land of Nod. Yet Moses only said
an " oer," meaning thereby, some chambered tumulus
of earth and stones, which one man might possibly, or
even easily, have built single-handed and might then ;
with full right " call it after his son's name.'! Such an
"oer" was rude probably, yet exactly adapted to serve
both as a stronghold and strong room, or a neces-
sary practical addition to what Josephus tells us of
Cain, at that very period of his life too, when "he
invented weights and measures, and used them only for
the purposes of rapacity and oppression."
Hence every few Cainites might well have an "oer'*
amongst them, but not " a city ;" and in freeing us from
this latter word, where Moses wrote "oer," Mr. Tompkins
* " The Pyramids and the Pentateuch," by Henry Tompkins, of

2, Augusta Place, Lansdowne Eoad, Clapham Road, Loudon, Oct. 22, 1873.
Chap.XVIIL] the great pyramid. 345
seems to have done excellent service ; though when he

proceeds further, to call every " oer " a Pyramid, he
wanders from the provable stone facts.
The word Pyramid (by sound of course, rather than
by not read in any of the Pharaonic hierogly-
letter) is
phics, nor proved to have been known earlier than the
visit of Herodotus to Egypt in 445 B.C. There too, it
was applied form of the " oer " seen
to a particular
nowhere else and the progress of mathematics since
;
then has still more strictly confined its application.

Hence, when we read in Genesis of the rebellious and
Cain-following men, after the flood, uniting together to
build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto
''
heaven," according to King James's translators, and —

when Mr. T. tells us rather to read, " Let us build a
Pyramid, and one of great extent, whose top," &c., let —

it be our part to endeavour to ascertain mechanically
what VMS built.

Nor is this very difficult ; for though Babel's old
structure may long since have been buried in the soft
alluvial earth of its foundations, yet the researches of
Lajârd, and others in Mesopotamia, all
Botta, Loftus,
unite in showing, that the buildings which served the
purposes of " oers " next in order of time to Babel, in
that part of the world, were invariably oblong, elevated,
terraced temples, and not to be called pyramids in any
degree.
Similarly too the chambered tumuli of the Lydians,
Etruscans, Pelasgi, and many other early people, were
"
all of them and many of them treasury " oers
" oers,"
too, but not one of them a pyramid. In Egypt only
did the " oers " become truly pyramidal and though ;
in that land, their primitive Cainite purpose of strong-

holds for treasure rapaciously acquired, was gradually
overshadowed by sepulchral service, yet they were not
always wholly merged therein, whatever the modern

I
Egyptologists choose oracularly to declare.*
To the all Egyptians were, some
intense Cainites, that
form of " oer was most necessary in their early
"
national life and though they did perhaps begin in
;
two or three small examples with chambered tumuli, or

Babel terraces, or even round towers,t the captivating
example of the Great Pyramid soon led them off into
that shape alone and they put its mark so effectually
;
on themselves, that the really Sethite character of the

Great Pyramid was lost to general view among newly
pyramidised Cainite *' oers."
And yet to a deeper insight there was, even in the
mere putting together of the material, the most essen-
tially different character in the one Great Pyramid
original, and all its supposed copies.
The Egyptians, for instance, according to Dr. Lepsius's
law of their Pyramid building (pages 76 and 77), pro-
ceeded in exactly the same exogenous manner as all
Cainites with their chambered tumuli i.e., beginning
;
with a chamber centre, and extending the structure

around and above, more or less, as opportunity offered
or accident determined at last.
But the Great Pyramid, as testified through the

whole of this book, and by the accounts of Herodotus
also, was commenced on the opposite, or endogenous
method viz., by the laying out of a long previously
;
settled plan, and building up within that outline only.
* Besides the many early local traditions, which must have some
foundation, of treasure having been deposited in the Egyptian Pyramids
—
by kings who lived close before, or after, the flood, Colonel Howard-
Vyse and Mr. Perring (on pp. 45, 46 of the former's 3rd vol. of " Pyra-
mids of Gizeh"), give an account of a chamber in the Great Terraced,
and rather oblong, Pyramid of Saccara, closed by a granite stopper of
four tons weight, and declared by them to have been " a treasury," "a
secure and secret treasury," and one that had certainly "never been put
to tombic use."
t The round- towers standing beside Christian churches in Ireland are
an architectural picture of Cain and Abel over again.
Chap.XVITL] the great pyramid. 347
While, therefore, the Cainite Egyptian Pyramids were

" Epimethean," or speaking to one hasty act and too
late —
thought afterwards, the Great Pyramid was essen-
tiallyPromethean, or the result of careful act following
upon previous wise and provident thought.
The former, even according to classic tradition,
brought infinity of ills on all humanity but the latter
;
told mysteriously, from far earlier ages, of one who

voluntarily sacrificed himself in order that he might
(in antagonism to the false gods of heathen idolatry),
bring down sacred fire, or regeneration life, from heaven
to men.
But of this primeval phase of the Promethean myth,
long before the Greeks polluted its purity and truth in
deference to all their own obscene rout of gods and
goddesses of Olympus,* we shall have still more posi-
tive evidence, on studying more advanced features of
construction found only in the Great Pyramid.
* See ** Seven Homilies on Ethnic Inspiration," by the Rev. Joseph

Taylor Goodair ; and " The Eeligions of the World," by William Oaburn,
CHAPTER XIX,
MECHANICAL DATA.
Air Channels.
FROM time to time in the modern history of the Great

Pyramid, faults have been found, or improvements
suggested, or difficulties raised with regard to its con-
struction and, where such remarks have been the
;
produce of able minds, it is well for instruction's sake,

in the present day, to turn back to their very words.
Also, if such criticisms have, since they were uttered,
been answered by further discoveries at the Pyramid, to
note how they have been answered.
A case in point is offered by the conversation of Dr.
Harvey, the learned discoverer of the circulation of the
blood, with Professor Greaves, in or about 1640. The
doctor, unable to leave his patients in this country, had
revolved at home in his truly capacious mind, and from
his own peculiar scientific point of view, one of the
descriptions given to him by the great Eastern traveller
of that day, and had seen a difficulty which had not
struck him.
To one so well versed in biological phaenomena (though
living long before the day of a knowledge of oxygen, or
the nature of gases, or, indeed, any sort of scientific
chemistry), seemed strange to Dr. Harvey, " how

it
several persons could have continued so many hours in

Chap. XIX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 349
the pyramid and live. For," said he, " seeing that we
never breathe the same air twice, but still new air is
required to a new inspiration (the succus alibilis of it
being spent in every expiration), it could not be, but by
long breathing, we should have spent the aliment of that
small stock of air within the Pyramid, and have been
stifled ; unless there were some secret tunnels conveying
it to the top of the Pyramid, whereby it might pass out,
and make way for fresh air to come in at the entrance
below."
Nowthat was a remark full of wisdom in every way,
and duly received and respected, might have led to
if
invaluable discoveries at an early period, but Professor —

Greaves, a good linguist, and with eminent dexterity
at solving algebraic equations, unfortunately could
not see the vital importance of Dr. Harvey's succus
alibilis mixed up in common air ; neither had he con-
sidered very accurately the motion of aeriform fluids,
when he thought that both the old air might so easily go
out, and new air as easily come in, by one and the same
lower entrance passage, of small bore and crooked, almost

" trapped," in the course of its length and finally he ;
was certain, as one who had been at the Pyramid, and

was therefore not to be lightly contradicted, that, " as
for any tuhuliy or little tunnels, to let out the fuliginous
air at the top of the Pyramid, none could he discovered
within or without''
To this Dr. Harvey replied most discreetly, "They
might be so small, as that they could not be easily
discovered, and yet might be sufiicient to make way for
the air, being a thin and subtile body."
But poor Professor Greaves on this occasion would not
listen to such homely reason, and only answered con-
futingly, he himself having chronicled his own words,
that, " The less they, the tuhuli, were, the sooner they
would be obstructed with those tempests of sand, to
which those deserts are frequently exposed ;" and with

these and similar positivisms he obliged the stay-at-home
medical doctor, in a phrase of that day, and which may
then have been classic and aristocratic English with all
'''"
the elder dons of Oxford, " To shut up all."

Yet what would Professor Greaves have thought, if
he could have known before he died, that 200 years
after his remarkable conversation with the discoverer of
the most important anatomical and physiological fact
even yet known to science, —
Colonel Howard- Vyse
would actually have proved the existence of, and found,
two such tuhuli, leading to the upper parts of the
Great Pyramid and formed for no other purpose than
:
that which Dr. Harvey had indicated, i.e., to serve as

ventilating channels and that he. Professor Greaves,
:
had himself actually seen their lower extremities in the

walls of the King's Chamber and proved the fact, by
;
inditing the following almost photographic likeness of

them :
" The ingenious reader will excuse my curiosity, t if,
before I conclude my description of this Pyramid, I

pretermit not anything within, of how light a consequence
soever. This made me take notice of two inlets or
spaces, in the south and north sides of the chamber, just
opposite to one another ; on the north was in
that
breadth 0700 of the Enghsh foot, and in height 0*400,
evenly cut, and running in a straight line six feet and
further, into the thickness of the wall. That on the
south is larger, and somewhat round, not so long as the
former, and, by blackness within, it seems to have been
the receptacle for the burning of lamps."
Upon which he indulges in a classical speculation
upon "the eternal lamps, such as have been found in
* Page 161, vol. i., of " Greaves," by Birch.

t The exact meaning of this word has altered greatly within the last
two hundred years.
Chap. XIX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 351
Tulliola's tomb in Italy ;" and regrets (in so far, just like
a mediaeval scholar, rather than a modern physicist),
actually regrets to think how much better Pliny might
have filled his pages, if he had described therein the
composition of one of those lamps of " noble inven-
tion," rather than occupied them with lesser matters of
natural phaenomena.
But the blackness adverted to at the Pyramid, would
seem to have been caused mainly by the fires which
were occasionally made in the hole, since Caliph Al
Mamoun's time, by Arabs with an inquisitive turn of
mind, and merely for the chance expectation of seeing
what would come of it. During the two following
centuries, also, the fashion grew up for each visitor and
tourist to conclude his sight-seeing of the Great Pyra-
mid, by firing his pistols into these holes.
What for ?
Even the decorous Dane, Captain Norden, who wrote

in 1740 to explain how young men going out to the
Great Pyramid " should join in a company with their
seniors, that, by the discourses they hear on the road,
they may be more emulous to observe everything in a
better manner, and make more exact remarks " even ; —
he, the worthy countryman of the learned Arabian
traveller,Niebuhr, explains, —
" when you are in the
saloon (the King's Chamber) you commonly make some
discharges of a pistol, to give yourself the ^pleasure of
Jtearing a noise that resembles thunder; and then, as
there no hope of discovering more than what others
is
have already remarked, you resume the way by which

you came, and return in the same manner, as well as
with the same difficulty."
Innumerable persons, therefore, besides Professor
Greaves, had portions of the air-channel system in their
hands ;but, through not respecting sufficiently the
design of the Great Pyramid, and the duty of using
352 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IY.
the best of tlieir own intellect, they went away no wiser
than they came, and the realizing at last of the best

ventilated, or rather ventilatable, room in the world
remained to another age.
Ceiling of Kings Chamber,

Again, certain early authors of a critically mechanical
turn, looked up at the ceiling of the King's Chamber,
roofed with horizontal beams of granite blocks, and ex-
pressed their thoughts in the manner of a judgment and
condemnation, that " those beams had a vast weight to
bear" (all the weight of the upper two-thirds of the
Pyramid above them) and, with some allusion to the
;
" arch," and no knowledge of any of the numerical and

physical symbolisms required in this chamber, they
rather hinted " that they could have made a better dis-
position of the material."
It has been supposed that the boastful legend in-
scribed by King Asychis on his pyramid of brick at
Dashoor, one thousand years after the building of the
Great Pyramid, referred to the invention or earliest
construction of arches in brick :
—
" Compare not me with
the Pyramids built of stone, which I as far excel as
Amun doth the other gods.For striking the bottom
and gathering the mud which
of the lake with long poles,
stuck to them, men made these bricks, and formed me
in this manner."
Contemporary science applauded that invention, and
thought it perfect but contemporary science, even up
;
to the present hour, is always marvellously well pleased

with its last and latest performance, however imperfect
the next generation may find it to have been and in
;
the case before us, 4,000 years have reduced nearly all
the brick pyramids to rubbish giving us reason for
:
thanks, that that scientific improvement was not invented

Chap. XIX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 3 S3
early enough to have been adopted in the Great Pyramid.

By no doubt the arch was good, and a brick arch
itself
stronger than a brick beam but neither a brick arch,
;
nor an arch of little stones, has stood so long as a beam

of solid granite in circumstances similar to those of the
King's Chamber.
If the roof of that chamber
any time fallen in,
Aac? at
and crushed the which
it was meant to
coffer below,
preserve, —
then all the scientific critics might have
started up with reason, to propose a more durable mode
of roofing but in presence of that roof's perfect perfor-
;
mance of duty, for a longer period than any other

its
human building has lasted, it was strange, to say the

least of it, that such a readiness to find fault and proffer
advice should have been manifested for, as M. Jomard
;
most admirably expresses it, " under this view of the

perfect state and condition of the whole room, the archi-
tects have eminently attained the end which they pro-
posed to themselves more than 3,000 years ago."
" Ah but if they have only saved themselves by the
!
skin of their teeth," urges another writer unabashed " if ;
they have been indebted to happy chance for a result,

of which the precise contrary might have at any moment
befallen them " Well, that is an objection which would
!
have been perhaps excusable in Professor Greaves' day,

when men knew nothing of what the means for strength
employed by the architects were or even, whether they
;
had had their attention directed to the importance of

the point. But ever since the discovery in 17G3 of
Davison's Chamber (so called, but really only a hollow
in the masonry not intended to be trod by the foot of
man), —
the learned must have seen, that some of the
requirements of the case had been skilfully entered into
by the builders though no person had any idea, until
;
Colonel Howard- Vyse made his celebrated explorations

in 1837, of the still further measures of extraordinary
A A
354- OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt IV.
completeness with which this scientific mechanical object

had been carried out ; a completeness so striking, that
we have never heard since then, of any more complaints
or fears for the safety of the ceiling.
Plate XL gives an idea of the arrangement adopted.
Besides the large, and pyramidally typical, number of
five hollow, closed spaces or j9seu(io-chambers, one over
the other, and the topmost one roofed with opposed
sloping plates, — it will be observed that the upper
surface of every set of long horizontal blocks, in place
of being formed into a flat floor, is left rough and
unfinished.
This is a feature, the truth of which, and perhaps the
importance also, entirely escaped the French savants of
1800, even in such limited part of the whole scheme
as theyhad before them whence it came, that they
;
represented the floor-surface of Davison's pseudo-chsimher

and also parallel to the
or hollow, as absolutely level,
King's Chamber true ceiling below, in the otherwise
beautiful and microscopically finished engravings of
their great work !
Yet, had the Pyramid architect so prepared and cut

away the upper original surface of each set of horizontal
granite beams, he would have notably weakened their
strength, and not have done good to any one for as ;
those hollows of construction were, with one proble-

matical exception indicated in the plate, built up solid
all round about,
and therefore not intended to be
entered, it whether their floors
signified not in the least
were even or uneven to any degree.
The whole arrangement was indeed a similar exhibi-
tion of mechanical genius, looking for efiiciency rather
than show, to that one described by Professor Rigaud
inan early transit-instrument of the Oxford Observatory;
where the artist optician had left, for strength's sake, the
rough, original skin on the outside surface of the brass,
Chap. XIX] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 355
though he had planed the under surface true, wherever

a joint had to be made, or a bearing secured. But in
the Pyramid, there was ultimate symbology also.
Modern Promiscuous Quarrymg.

Then again, no one seems hitherto to have had any
respect, and that because no understanding, of why the
mass of solid masonry was so overwhelmingly large,
compared with the hollow portion of the Pyramid the ;
latter being only about 1 -2000th of the former.

Firmness of construction, they thought, would have
been given by a far less amount of solid substance ;
wherefore, and for that mere fancy, bred of their own

brain alone, feeling sure that there must be many
chambers still undiscovered, they immediately began
ruthlessly boring and cruelly blasting here, there, and
everywhere into the exquisitely-arranged, squared, lime-
stone blocks, and to a depth often of a great many feet,
merely to see what blind chance might possibly lead
them to. Forgetful, also, of a really very sage piece of
advice, said by an Arab tradition, shaming Herodotus,
to have been engraved on the ancient casing stone
surface of the Pyramid by its unknown architect "I :
have built them, and whoever considers himself

powerful may try to destroy them. Let him, however,
reflect that to destroy is easier than to build."
Had Mehemet Ali been inclined to intellectual
tyranny, what sport to him had up before his
to have
judgment-seat each of these quarrying geniuses, and made
them render forth, if they could, a presentable reason,
based on Pyramid knowledge, for the dark hope that
was within them, as to why they should have met with
success by making a hole in the particular direction
they did. And if they could not give such a reason
clearly and convincingly, order them to put back every
stone they had pulled out, precisely as itwas before a ;
more than sufficient occupation for the remaining term

of their natural lives.*
Who among
Egyptologists, would escape such a
too,
judgment Not even the excellent Sir Gardner Wil-
?
kinson who, when describing the Queen's Chamber in

;
the Great Pyramid, says with the most inimitable calm-

ness, and without a pang on his conscience for the
mischief he had done to so precious a work, " I ex-
cavated in vain below in quest of a sepulchral pit." t
And a pretty pit, indeed, I found he had made of it,
when I visited the place in 1865 !
The Key-signs of the Great Pyramid's Architect.
Yet infinitely more blameable were those before him,

who made similar, but yet more destructive, excavations,
* Connected with this view, the following is given from the Arabian
author, Abd Allatif, who wrote more than five hundred j-ears since, and
who, ill times ot boasting and romance, described his own exploits in such
modest terms, but terriWe truth, as this :
—
" When I again visited the
Pyramids, I entered this passage with several people, but having pene-
trated about two-thirds into the interior, and having through fear com-\
pletely lost my senses, I returned half dead."
A bad explorer, then, but an unflinching historian, Abd Allatif relates
in the latter capacity :
" When Malic Alaziz Othman Ben Youssuf succeeded" his father, he
was prevailed on by. some persons of his court— people totally devoid of
—
sense and judgment to attempt the demolition of the Pyramids. He
accordingly sent miners and quarrymen, under the superintendence of
some of the officers and emirs of his court, with orders to destroy the red
pyramid, which is the best of the three. They encamped near it, col-
lected labourers from all parts of the country at a vast expense, and
endeavoured, with great assiduity for eight months, to execute the com-
mission with which they were entrusted, removing each day, with great
difficulty, one ortwo such stones. At length, having exhausted all their
pecuniary resources, their resolution grew proportionally weaker as their
labour and difficulties increased, and they were at last obliged to give up
the undertaking as hopeless. VVhile they were still engaged in the work,
observing one day the extreme labour it required to remove one of the
hlocks, I asked an overseer, who was superintending the operation,
whether, if a thousand pieces of gold was offered to him, he wôuld under-
take to replace the block in its original position he answered, that it he
:
v/ere to be given many times that sum, he could not do so." Col. Howard —
Vyse's second vol. of " Pyramids of Gizeh."
t Murray's "Handbook for Egypt," p. 167.
with the absurd idea of finding a passage leading to the

Sphinx ! As if there was any community in science or
between the built Great Pyramid
religion, feeling or age,
and the carved stock or stone called the Great Sphinx.
As if, too, I may add, there was anything of original
importance in the Great Pyramid's structure which had
not had both a proper and a regidar access prepared
to it, requiring no smashing with sledge-hammers or
cannon-balls, when the proper time should arrive, to
open it up to view and use.
The passages lined, or rather built, with blocks of
whiter stone different from the bulk of the masonry,
and leading thereby right on to the ultimate point
required through the whole mountainous mass of the
building, are a case directly in point and are admitted
;
by, and known now to, every one, even including the
Egyptologists. But there are more minute features also,
not so generally known yet showing equal design and
;
intention, in these very Pyramid passages.

Thus every one has been told how Caliph Al Ma-
moun, after blasting his way through the solid fabric
for six weeks, was just about to give up the research
when he heard a stone fall in a hollo^v space close
on one side and breaking his way in that direction, he
;
presently found himself in the entrance-passage and ;
the stone which had fallen at that precise instant, was

a prism-shaped block that had been anciently inserted
in the ceiling. There it had for ages formed a merely
ordinary part thereof, and yet was covering all the time
the butt-end of the granite portcullis at the bottom of
the first ascending passage, now at last exposed to view.
Would that first ascending passage, then, never have
been discovered, if that faithless, perhaps timeous, block
had not fallen out, whether in Al Mamoun's or any
other day ? Let the following facts indicate.
When measuring the cross joints in the floor of tb«
entrance-passage in 1865, I went on chronicling their

angles, each one proving to be very nearly at right
angles to the axis, until suddenly one came which was
diagonal, another, and that was diagonal too ; but after
that, the rectangular position was resumed. Further,
the stone material carrying these diagonal joints was
harder and better than elsewhere in the floor, so as to
have saved that part from the monstrous excavations
elsewhere perpetrated by some moderns. Why then
did the builders change the rectangular joint angle at
that point, and execute such unusual angle as they
chose in place of it, in a better material of stone than
elsewhere ; and yet with so little desire to call general
attention to it, that they made the joints fine and close
to that degree that they had escaped the attention of
all men until 1865 a.d. ?
The answer came from the diagonal joints themselves,
on discovering that the stone between them was oppo-
site to the butt-end of the portcullis of first ascending
passage, or to the hole whence the prismatic stone of
concealment through 3,000 years had dropped out
almost before Al Mamoun's eyes. Here, therefore, was
a secret signjn the pavement of the entrance-passage,
appreciable only to a careful eye and a measurement
by angle, but made in such hard material that it was
evidently intended to last to the end of human time
with the Great Pyramid, and lias done so thus far.
Had, then, that ceiling-stone never dropped out at
all, still the day might have come when the right men
at last, duly instructed, would have entered the passage,

understood that floor sign, and, removing the ceiling-
stone opposite to it, would have laid bare the begin-
ning of the whole train of those subaerial features of
construction which are the Great Pyramid's most dis-
tinctive glory, and exist in no other Pyramid in Egypt
or the world.
Chap. XIX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 351)
Uses of the Queens Chamber,
But if in this simple manner of a small trap-door in

the ceiling descending entrance-passage, the
of the
ascending system of the Great Pyramid was so long
concealed, there was once in that ascending system,
viz., at or just inside the lower end of the grand
gallery, and in the floor thereof,— a more extensive
trap-door, which concealed the access to the Queen s
Chamber and the horizontal passage leading to it.
At present, when the traveller enters the north end
of the grand gallery from the first ascending passage,
he is delighted to meet with a level floor ; but following
that southward, he finds that it leads presently, not to
the farther end of the grand gallery, but to a hole
under a steep escarpment of its floor close by in fact, ;
to the beginning of the low horizontal passage leading

to the Queen's Chamber. (See Plates VIIL, XII., and
XIII.) The floor of the grand gallery itself is inclined
at the typical angle of 26° 18' (my measures by three
difl*erent methods, with far more powerful instruments
than ever taken inside the Great Pyramid before,
made it 26° 17' 37"); antl runs, from the lowest north
end right up to the great step at the south termina-
tion of the gallery, in one continued slope, except for
the interruption caused by the absolute removal of a
portion of the floor near the north end, to allow of
that sub-floor horizontal passage to the Queen's Chamber
being approached on a level. But there are traces still
visible in the masonry on either side of that hole

in the gallery's floor, well interpreted, first by Mr.
Perring, and more recently by Mr. Waynman Dixon,
engineers both showing, that a neatly-laid and joist-
;
supported flooring, nine inches thick, did once exist

over that hole, completing thereby the whole long slope
of the grand gallery's floor and in that case entirely
;
3&0 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
concealing and utterly shutting up all approach to, or

knowledge tou'ching the very existence of, the Queen's
Chamber.
Who amongst mediaeval men pulled away that con-
cealing floor, removed its supporting cross-beams, and
pushed on into the Queen's Chamber, is not known
now, any more than why it was so concealed by the
original builders. Mr. Perring imagined that the
chamber must have been used as a store-room during
the building of the Pyramid, for the big blocks of stone
which were, at the finishing, slided down into the first
ascending passage until, from the portcullis at its lower
end, that passage was full up to its very top and ;
the workmen then escaped by the deep well and its

subterranean communication with the entrance-passage.
Quite willing am I to allow to the honest working
engineer, that such a store-room purpose may have been
served but was that all that the place was intended
:
for ? And if so, to what end are all the following

features; features too, which are much more certain
than that use for the features exist still, and can be
;
seen every day, but who witnessed the use ?
1. The central axis of the niche in the east wall

(and that niche this Queen's Chamber's only architec-
tural adornment) is removed southward from the centre
thereof by one Pyramid, or sacred Hebrew,
scientific
cubit length. (See Plate IX.)
2. The top of the niche is one similar Pyramid, and
sacred Hebrew, cubit broad.*
3. The height of the niche, multiplied by that
grandly fundamental quantity in the Great Pyramid, tt,
and that multiplied by the Pyramid number 10 = the
* 25-3 inches in each case by measure, in place of 25*025 ; but the

measures very rough.
height of the Great Pyramid ; orl85x7rxl0 = 5812

in place of 5813.^
4. The height of the niche, less the height of its
inner species of long shelf, equals similarly the half
of the base-side length of the Great Pyramid or ;
185 — 39*6 X 10 7r=4568, in place of 4566 inches.!

5. The height of the north and south walls of the
Queen's Chamber measured 18222 Pyramid inches =

± 1 inch, and assumed 182 '6 2, give
»
(1)
182'62
~— =
y 10
9131 = length of Great Pyramid's base-side in P. in.
(2) 182-62 X 2 = 365-24 = solar days in solar tropical year.
6. The breadth of the Queen's Chamber measured
= 205 "6, assumed 205*0, gives
182-62 : 205 ; : 205 : 230-1 = height of King's Chamber from floor to

ceiling.
7. The square root of 10 times the height of the

north or south walls, divided by the height of the
niche =
tt ; or,
' =
182-62 X 10
18.3 V
All the above theorems, save the two first, are the
discoveries of Professor Hamilton L. Smith (of Hobart
College, Geneva, New York), who, without having been
to Egypt, and without any other Pyramid measures than
those contained in " Life and Work," has, by success-
fully interpreting them, constituted himself in a most
unexceptionable manner the citizen-king of the Queen's
Chamber.
A fuller account of his researches has appeared in
the November number of the American Journal of
* The height of the niche uncertain, by the measures, between 185 and
186 inches.
t The shelf's height is, by the very rough measures, between 38 and
40 inches.
ScicTice and Art; which number, too, at the time I

write (Dec. 1873) seems to have reached London, but
not Edinburgh. And I must beg my readers to refer
to his very paper for themselves ; for, while the said
London journals merely and most miserably say of the
memoir, " Professor H. L. Smith finds that the arrange-
ments of the Queen s Chamber were scientific," ^he —
wrote to me positively and particularly some time ago, that
his conclusive arrangement of the whole of what he had
discovered took the form of the twd* horns of a dilemma,
on either of which he left the opponents of the sacred
and scientific theory of the Great Pyramid to impale
themselves, as they preferred.
" Either," said he, ''
there is proof in that chamber
of supranatural inspiration granted to the architect
or
"
That primeval official possessed, without inspiration,
in an age of absolute scientific ignorance, 4,000 years
ago, scientific knowledge equal to, if not surpassing,
that of the present highly-developed state of science in
the modern world."
This is so radically different a state of things to what
is implied in the London journals, that, in. the absence
still of his own printed paper, I refer to some of Pro-
fessor H. L. Smith's private letters of last summer ;
and would direct attention to the remarkable number

of characteristic angles which he has discovered in this
chamber, and all of them well within the limits of some
of my measurements a few of them running thus
;
:
Casing-stone angle, again and again 51° 51'

Latitude 30°
Co-latitude 60°
Upper culmination of a Draconis 33° 41'
Lower culmination of a Draconis 26° 22'
Upper culmination of ij Tauri . = 4° 21' North of Equator.
Newly-discovered Air-channds in Queens Chamber.
Now here we have seen a whole series of connections

between the actually existing measurable facts of the
Queen's Chamber, and scientific portions of the ulti-
mate, and originally secret, design of the Great Pyramid ;
a design utterly unknown to the ancient Egyptians,

and alien to everything that belonged to them and
their "wisdom," such as it was ; teste the Egyptologists
themselves ; — features, too, all of them entirely un-
necessary to a mere store-room for stone blocks, or to a
chamber for holding a simple sarcophagus. Therefore,
although some of the early travellers have spoken fear-
fully of "the grave-like and noisome odour of this
room, causing them to beat a rapid retreat," the room
must have acquired that odious character from modern
vilifying, rather than ancient construction for what its ;
builders put into it, as we see above, is not of a nature
to experience any fleshly corruption.

Indeed, in its ancient planning, the Queen's Chamber
would appear to have been, still further, intended some
day to be ventilated. Eor the chief item of latest
discovery at the Great Pyramid, is that one which was
made last winter by Mr. Waynman Dixon, in company
with his friend Dr. Grant, and with the assistance of
one of his English workmen from the bridge he was
then erecting over the Nile and is to the effect, that
;
this Queen's Chamber has two ventilating channels in

its north and south walls, nearly similar to those in the
King's Chamber.
Perceiving a crack in the south wall of the Queen's
Chamber, which allowed him at one place to push in a
wire to a most unconscionable length, Mr. W. Dixon
set his carpenter man-of-all-work, by name Bill Grundy,
to jump a hole with hammer and iron chisel at that
place. So to work the faithful fellow went, and with a
364 ,
OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
will which soon began to make a way into the soft

stone, when lo after a very few strokes, flop went the
!
chisel right through, into somewhere or other. So the

party broke away the stone round about the chisel hole,
and then found a rectangular, horizontal tube about
9 by 8 inches in breadth and height, going back 7 feet
into the wall, and then rising at an angle of about 32°.
Next, measuring otf a similar position on the north
wall, Mr. Dixon set the invaluable Bill Grundy to work
there again with his hammer and iron chisel and ;
again, after a few strokes, flop went the said chisel

through, into somewhere which somewhere was pre-
;
sently found to be a horizontal pipe or channel like the

other, and rising at a similar angle, but in an opposite
direction, at a distance of 7 feet from the chamber.
Fires were then made inside the tubes or channels ;
but although at the southern one the smoke went away,

its exit was not discoverable on the outside of the
Pyramid. Something else, however, was discovered inside

the channels, viz., a little bronze grapnel hook a por- ;
tion of cedar-like wood, which might have been its

handle and a grey granite or green-stone ball, which,
;
from its weight, 8,325 grains, as weighed by me in

November, 1872, must evidently have been one of the
profane Egyptian inina weight balls, long since valued
by Sir Gardner Wilkinson at 8,304 grains.*
These relics approached so nearly in character to the
* A month after I had made the ahove measure and deduction, and com-
municated them to Mr. John Dixon, who had kindly sent me the articles to
examine, the ball was weighed by the "Warden of the Standards, found to
be 8324-97 grains (see his paper in Nature, Dec. 26, 1872) whence it is also
;
concluded that the stone may have been an old Egj-plian mina weight. A
closeness of agreement, especicillj'^ in the weight, which is remarkable, if
the Warden of the Standards had not heard of my previous measuring
and conclusion, and which he certainly does not allude to.
Thin flakes of a very white mortar, exuded from the joints of the
channels, were also found; and on being recently analysed by Dr. William
Wallace, of Glasgow, were proved to be composed not of carbonate., as
generally used in Europe, but sulphate, of lime; or what is popularly
known as **
plasler-of- Paris " in this country.
ordinary nick-nackets of most men's archaeology, that

they excited quite a furore of interest, for a time, in
general antiquarian circles but nothing more has come
;
of them. The ball and the hook are supposed to have

been dropped down the channels unintentionally by
some of the mason's labourers or boys at the passages'
upper ends, when the place of those ends was still open
and accessible but the things thus strangely found,
;
belong merely to the forced labourers, the hodmen, of

profane Egypt ; not to the architect and head admi-
nistrator of the scientific and inspired design.
An Unexplained Feature in the Queens Chamber

Air-channels.
Something of the mysterious, however, still remains

touching Mr. Waynman Dixon's air-channels of the
Queen's Chamber.
When their inner ends, or ports, were proved to
have been separated from the air of said chamber
merely by a thin plate of soft limestone (so easily
pierced by Bill Grundy's chisel), every one leaped to
the conclusion that they had originally been in use, but
had been stopped up by some mediasval interloper with
a paltry stone patch. But this was not the case for
;
Mr. Dixon has successfully proved that there was no

jointing, and that the thin plate was a " left," and a
very skilfully and symmetrically left, part of the grand
block composing that portion of the wall.
That block, therefore, had had the air-channel tube
(9x8 inches) sculptured into it, neatly and beautifully
as far as it went, but that distance was not quite through
the whole block by a mere finger's breadth. Th^ whole
air-channel, save that little unmade bit, was in place
but could never have been used. Not, too, that it had
been tried, found inconvenient, and was then stopped
OUR INHERITANCE IN IV.
up by the original builders ; for they would in that

case either have filled the port with a long plug, or
would have replaced the whole block carrying the inner
end of the channel, with another block quite solid.
But the arrangement which these builders left behind
them was one which, if simply described according to
the facts which have already occurred in history, was
this viz., that after the chamber has been for long
;
ages ill-treated and maligned by the idle and ignorant

of civilized peoples, —
should yet be possible for a
it
well-informed man toand, by little more than

enter,
pressure with his fingers on a particular part of the
wall, establish (if the upper ends have in the meanwhile
remained intact), a complete system of ventilation by
means of air-channels, extending through solid masonry
on either side no less than 300 feet in thickness.
Scheme of the Masonry in First Ascending Passage.
Besides making this strange discovery, in concert

with his friend Dr. Grant, of Cairo, Mr. Waynman
Dixon performed a great work in the first ascending
passage of the Great Pyramid.
My examination of that passage in 1865, was con-
fined to little more than its angle and floor length ;
partly on account of the bewildering varieties of the

jointing, as they appeared on a cursory examination.
But Mr. Waynman Dixon, in 1872, applying himself
long and steadily to this special task, and mapping
down everything measurable, presently perceived a most
admirable order pervading the apparent disorder, and
tending also to good masonic construction. For the
chief discovery was, that at stated intervals the blocks
forming separately the walls, floor, and ceiling of the
passage, were replaced by great transverse plates of
stone, with the passage bore cut clean through them,

so as to form walls, floor, and ceiling, all in one piece.
As an engineer he admired this masonry. But he
had not perceived, until I was recently able to point it
out to him, on his own careful measures, that the
intervals of passage-length at which these remarkable
stone 'plates were introduced, were no other than
breadths of the King's Chamber.
The first interval, indeed, at the top of the passage
was a double one, and therefore equalled the length of
the King's Chamber but then followed five plates, with
;
that chamber's breadth, or 206 inches, between every

pair of similar surfaces ; and after that, or in the lower
part of the passage, near the granite plugs, the plates
were contiguous.
This unexpected illustration of the builders working
by measure, and in terms of that one chamber which is
now confessed to be the focus of the whole scientific
design, but which was not then built into fact, may be
taken as a proof of the Promethean, or forethought,
character of the whole of the Great Pyramid building.
And it may justify me, I hope, before my readers, in
concluding this chapter, intended to be of mere
mechanical details, with some further references to
structural connections, bearing on deep physical results,
between the said King's Chamber, and its one con-
tained treasure, — the coffer.
Relatione of King's Chamber to Coffer,
That coffer being loose on the King's Chamber floor,

without either niche or socket prepared for its reception
or fixaftion, there was much fear expressed only a few
years ago, that it might not be the original coffer, or
sarcophagus, intended for the Great Pyramid by its
architect.
Yet never has theoretic fear been more abundantly

quieted by actual discoveries of solid facts.
Some of these discoveries have been already stated

in Part II., but others have come to light since then,
chiefly through the researches, quite independently of

each other, of Professor Hamilton L. Smith, and Mr.
Jalnes Simpson and may be stated thus
; :
1. The coffer belongs essentially to the King's Cham-

ber, because it is tt shaped (first ascertained by Mr.
St. John V. Day), and after the same manner nearly,
though in a different plane, as that chamber which is
also of TT proportions. For while height of coffer =
radius of a circle, whose circumference is of the same
length as the coffer's extreme outer boundary so the ;
King's Chamber half breadth (made so much use of in

obtaining the equations of the " sums of the squares "),
is radius to a circle, whose circumference the peri- =
phery of either north or south wall of King's Chamber
with their full height, or measured from their own
granite bases five inches beneath the floor.
2. The coffer belongs Chamber, be-

to the King's
cause cubic contents are Vo of the chamber's lower
its
course contents; and the chamber is also on the 50th

masonry course of the whole Pyramid.
3. The coffer further belongs to the King's Chamber,
because its height is \ (Pyramid number) of the cham-

ber's breadth, and -h (Pyramid number), of its length
and its height squared =A
(Pyramid number) of the
"''
;
area of the chamber.

4. The coffer still further belongs to the King's
Chamber, because the outside periphery of the coffer's
base is equal to half the most important line that can
* The measured height of the coffer, as already given, lies hetween

41'23 and 41-13, and tlie breadth and length of the chamher.are respec-
tively 2(16 07, and 412-13 Pyramid inches, to within less than the tenth of
an inch, which will enable any one to compute how near the above stated
proportions came.
be drawn in the room, viz., its solid diagonal ; for the

half of 257"58 inches, and the coffer's base
this is
periphery by measure is 257'24, but with an anomaly

in the measure of the west side (see p. 137), which
being corrected would bring it up more nearly to
257-50.
5. Again, the coffer belongs to the King's Chamber,
because all three of its dimensions, external, are given

by the half of the chamber's magistral radius (i.e., the
half of its solid diagonal), 12879 inches, when typically
divided, or thus :
128-79
^|-^ X T = 40-996 = central height of coffer = 41-13 — 4f
128'79
. X 3 = 38-637 = breadth of coffer outside = 3S-61
128-79
X 7 = 90154 = length of coffer outside = 89-92»
Of which multipliers, while tt is evidently the Pyramid

number, 3 and 7 are very important coadjutors to it.f
6. The coffer was not necessarily intended for nothing
but a coffin, as the Egyptologists assert, merely because
it is long enough for a man to lie down in for the ;
above is one of its many consistent, numerical and

scientific features, which demand its actual full length ;
and another still is shown by Professor Hamilton L.

Smith thus :
Let the number of inch-days in a year, or 365*24

inches =
360° then ;
Coffer's inside width measured = 26-73 in. = 26° 18' = angle of Pyramid
passages.
., depth „ = 34-34 in. = 33° 48' = upper cultiiination
of a Dniconis.
„ length „ = 77-93 in. = 76°48' =Sutnniit angle of
Pyruinid nearly.
But 90'09, on the removal of the anomaly from the west foot, already
mentioned.
t See a paper by "William Petrie, in my "Life and Work," vol. iii.,
p. 602.
B B
Whereupon, and with reference to previously noted

commensurabilities, Professor H. L. Smith remarks, very
happily, if this stone box was intended for nothing but
a what a nice kind of a coffin it must have been

coffin, ;
and are there any of our modern mathematicians who

would undertake to give the dimensions of such another
coffin, combining as many scientific data especially ;
too, in order to make it a parallel case in everything,

scientific data not yet known to mankind, but to be
known 4,000 years hence ?
7. Lastly, of the coffer's cubic contents, its most im-

portant element as a vessel of capacity.
I have already published, as the result of my direct
measures taken in combination with the earliest com-
mensurabilities which I had discovered in 1868, the
following quantities :
71,178
71,292
71,317
71,160
71,266
71,258
But all the last three of these should probably be

slightly increased for that anomaly in the measure of
the lower west side of the coffer (see p. 1 1 8 vol. ii. of
" Lifeand Work,") which has just been brought into
more evident existence by the light of some of Mr.
James Simpson's more recent commensurabilities and ;
he now adds the following results of coffer-contents

from his own calculations :
A First wall course of King's Cham'ber -f- 50 . . . = 71,470

B The same when height is made to correspond to ic pro- |
— /M^l
«, .„,
portion J
Outside contents of coflFer deduced from cubic semi-diagonal »,
of King's Chamber, and -^ 2
\
j
— '^'*""
.^^
D From the same, made to correspond to tt . . . . t= 71, -^88

E Squareof inside breadth (measured =26-703) X 10 . =71,307
F Product of interior measures =71,318
G Soliddiagonalof Queen's Chamber X 200 . . . =71,394
H United length of the 8 arris lines of the Great Pyramid . = 71,276
Chap. XIX.] THE GREAT PFRAMIl) 371
The mean of all the quantities, first and last, being

near 71,310; and the resulting figure for the earth's
mean density, on the principle mentioned in Part II.,
being 5*705. And Mr. James Simpson further adds,
that whereas the cube-root of 71,310 =
41 4 68 and
the cube-root of the earth's bulk in cubic Pyramid
inches* -j- 10^ (the cubit into earth's semi-axis of ro-
tation number) =z 40'389, these numbers include the
height of the coffer between them. Whereupon, dividing
the height of the King's Chamber 230*4247 by the
earth-bulk derived quantity of 40*389, there comes —
out as the number, which we may assume in symbology
to represent the earth's mean density, 5*70511 ; i.e.,
confirming the previously arrived at 5*705 so far as it
goes.
Earth's Density, closely approodmated to.
Now these corrections by Mr. Simpson of my earlier

5*70, I venture to regard as of the utmost practical
importance : Pyramid weights and measures
for if the
had to be re-enacted by ourselves for national use, we
should require to know most accurately either the con-
tents of the coffer, or the mean density of the earth, or
both.
But the poor coffer is now so broken by mischief-
mongers (more broken too in 1873 than it was in
1865 A.D.) that no improved measures will in future be
obtainable from it, over those which have already been
procured and the earth's mean density is too dtfficult a
;
subject for modern science to deal with to the requisite

accuracy.
From the Great Pyramid, I had deduced for that
* Computed very carefully by Mr. Petrie for the ellipsoidal earth, and
corrected for the terr-aqueous level, a refinement not yet adopted even in
the best geodesy of the dny, at 65 892,118 000,000 000,000 000.000
| | | |
Pyramid cubic inches. (See my " Antiquity of Intellectual Man," p. 472.)

372 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.-
earth feature, in 1867, the quantity 5-70 expressly

:
saying that might be considered certain to '01 of

it
unity; and that it certainly was not so small as 5 "69,

nor so large as 5-71 and now behold, after Mr. James
;
Simpson, with admirable skill and quite unknown to

me, has made all the correction he can through his
further discoveries of Pyramid data, his efforts do not
alter the final quantity beyond 5 '706.
And what has modern science to compare against
5700, and
5-706.
She has two results her two last, and in so far they
;
should be her best. One of them is by Sir George Airy,

Astronomer-Royal, representing the Greenwich Observa-
tory and all the men and money power of the mighty
British Admiralty and the other is by Captain Ross
;
Clarke, R.E., C.B., under the superintendence of General

Sir Henry James, R.E., representing the Ordnance Survey,
and all the men and money power of the equally
mighty British Army War Office and these two great
;
national efforts of modern times stand thus,
6-565, and
5-316.
Well, these two quantities evidently include a long

way between them all the Pyramid results but are so
;
absurdly far,one from the other, that they not only do

not serve to test the Pyramid's accuracy, much less to
replace it in any very practical question, but they may
assist too well in showing some Joseph Hume redivivus,
that much money of our country has been expended
over and over again in getting had results in science.
"Chap. XIX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 373
They may also succeed in salutarily proving, at least

to somie, modern science so-called, and in the words of
my venerable friend, Rev. F. R. A. Glover,

**
That Science of every kind is after, and not before,
God (Job xxxviii. 4, 5, 6) : and, that the right use of
all Science is, to make the human mind capable of
appreciating God, — God the —God of Revelation of the
Dispersion —God Exodus— God
of the —The of Calvary
God due to —and by
come, attempt
not it to to de-
throne Him." (Isaiah xxix. 14; 1 Cor. i. 19).
I
374 OLR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
CHAPTER XX.
SACRED, AND PROPHETIC, TIME.
THERE was once a well-supported piece of special

flooring in the Grand Gallery, near its northern end,
concealing from view the horizontal passage leading to
the Queen's Chamber. Just so much indeed was stated
in the last chapter but there was also a manner of
;
performing the work peculiar to the Great Pyramid,

and that still remains for due description, assisted by
Plates YIIL, XIL, XIII.
Thus the supporting beams or joists, as shown by the
holes for them on either side, within and below the level
of the ramps, were 5 in number a Pyramid 5, too, ;
inasmuch as one of them was larger and thicker than

the other four. But more noteworthy is the height of
the Grand Gallery's permanent stone floor at the inner
or southern end of the hole in it, and where that floor's
long slope coming down from the south is suddenly cut
off; or descends vertically to a lower level, to allow of
a flat approach, from the north beginning of the Grand
Gallery to the Queen's Chamber's horizontal passage end.
That steep escarpment of the Grand Gallery's floor,
looks almost like a little cliff, being, together with the
dark passage mouth it overhangs, 8 6 '2 5 inches high to

any one standing on the level area in front of it.* But
that area is 6 inches higher, nearly, than the very begin-
* "Life and Work," vol. ii., pp. 70 and 71 ; also for height, p. 59.
Chap. XX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 375
ning of the Grand Gallery ;* and the escarpment itself is

under-estimated by the amount of 9 inches, which depth
has been removed for a short distance to allow of the
overlapping of the special floor which once covered the
hole. The entire height, therefore, of the frontal cliff
for symbolical purposes is not much short of 101 '25
inches and this quantity, though in rough approxima-
;
tion only, stands before us here very much in the guise of

the leading Pyramid symbol for a day viz., 100 inches. :
But is there anything at this point concerning a day ?

If of days at all, it should be of seven days, seeing that
the feature of the Grand Gallery most usually attractive
to travellers, next after its commanding height, is, the
seven overlappings of its walls.
Now the Pyramid's entrance-passage has already been
shown to have something to do with days and the ;
inclined passage which enters the north end of the Grand

Gallery is very similar in size to it, being by measure
5 3 2 inches high vertically. The passage, however,
which exits from the south end of the Grand Gallery,
is only 43 6 inches high vertically and as we cannot use
;
either one or other exclusively in referring to the Grand

Gallery between them, we have to take the mean of the
two, or 48 4 ; and then find, that that quantity goes
seven times, exactly to a hundredth, into 339*2, which
is the vertical height of Aie Grand Gallery at a mean
of 1 5 points in its whole length ; speciall}^ measured

too with a grand 3 to 400 inch slider measuring-rod,
presented to mo for this very purpose by Andrew
Coventry, Esq., of Edinburgh, in 1864.t
Now this result may, or it may not, be intended in
" Life and Work," vol. ii. p. 61.

t See " Life and Work," ii. pp. 84—86.
vol. Former travellers' mea-
"
sures of the iK'itrht of tho Grand GitUery vary from 270 to "aboiit 600
inches, and art- jjfiven without detail. The inclined tioor length being by
my measures 1881 Pyramid inches, tho angle 'iG** 17' 37", »i»d the hori-
zontal length computed 1686 -4 Pyramid inches, Mr. James Simpsoa hat
this part of the Pyramid to assist in typifying 7 days

(more strictly 7 half-days taken twice over) and ;
is of only subsidiary importance in itself; because

7 days merely, is a pagan mystical number which any
one might hit upon, and without its having anything to
do with the sabbatical week of Scripture for that was :
an institution which, though including or spanning over

7 days in its entirety, was far more noteable for com-
memorating 6 working days and one day of rest with a
totally distinct character, and a special ordination by
inspired command to be held sacred to God the Creator
of all.
TAe Biblical Week
We have not, therefore, yet found anything in the

Great Pyramid touching, in any clearly discriminative
manner, on the week of the Bible. But if we now
follow along that level passage with the hundred inch
day symbol overhanging its entrance, viz., the horizontal
passage leading to the Queen's Chamber, the last part —
of that passage is found to be one half nearly greater in
depth than the rest and the length of that deeper part is
;
one-seventh of the whole length of the floor from the be-

ginning of the Grand Gallery up to the Queen's Chamber
wâll itself'''' This looks like a beginning of a sabbatical
week symbolism and while the passage, of necessity,
;
ends by debouching into the Queen's Chamber, its

seventh deeper portion, which has a length of 215*9
inches, is found to be roughly a mean between the
pointed out that the typical fifth part thereof =337*3 Pyramid inches: a
close approach to the 339-2 measurpd, seeing that the variations, in places,
Hmonnted to anything between 333*9 and 346*0, by reason chiefly of the
tilt of each of the long roof-stones to the general shape of the whole roof.
* See "Life and Work," vol. ii. pp. 55, 61. The whole distance
r=: 1517*9, and the smaller distance with the lower plan level =
215*9
Pyramid inches, with an inch of possible error.
Chap. XX.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 377
length and breadth (2265 and 206) of the floor of

that chamber on the same deeper ievel.*
In that chamber behold we a fair, white stone,
apartment, exquisitely built originally (except as to its
present floor, which, for some reason or other, is rough,
and composed of mere untrimmed building blocks) but ;
with this special and overriding feature accompanying

and distinguishing it from the other Great Pyramid
chambers; viz., that by reason of its having for ceiling
a double inclined slope, the whole room may be said
to have seven sides of which seven, the floor, which
;
has not had a tool lifted up against it within the building

(though the others, of more finished character, had), is
decidedly larger than all the rest in area.
Those other sides, however, are not quite equal and
similar amongst themselves, unless reductions are made,
founded on some features which do exist, marked into the
walls t but whose full signification has yet to be accu-
;
rately made out. It may be better, therefore, at present,

to conclude this part of theargument for the sabbatical
week of Scripture being indicated in this chamber, from
Mr. James Simpson's sums of the squares, and which
are given by the chief proportions of the room to a
higher, though not an absolute, degree of certainty.
Taking the room, then, with an artificial ceiling,
assumed in plan just beneath the angular beginnings
of the roof (or at the greatest height to leave the apart-
ment with such as ordinary rooms possess),
six sides,
the sums of the of its radius into every
squares
dimension amount to 60 or, says Mr. Simpson, to 6
;
working days of 10 each. But next take the major

height, or that central and superior height which effec-
* Salt incrustations prevent very accurate measures in this room, but

the 206- width is alrnoMt a reproduction of the King's Chamber breadth ;
which feature would have been lost, if the Chamber had been m ide 216*
square in plan.
t *• Life and Work," vol. iii. pp. 229—232.
tively gives the room its seventh side, and the sum of
the square there, and there alone, is 7;* or typical of the
divinely-ordained day of rest ; and without interfering
with what has already been ascertained for this chamber's
indicating the tt proportion of the Pyramid, its angles,
its absolute size, and the length of the Sacred Cubit.
Grand Qallerys Cubical ComTnensurahilities.
Let us now return from this Queen's Chamber, so"
called (which to ordinary corporeal research is a cul de

sac),and we shall find a certain amount of connection
between it and the Grand Gallery. Only a small amount,
but of a somewhat similar kind to what there is between
a week and a year inasmuch as both of them are
;
measures of time, though the week does not march along

evenly and decimally with the year in questions of
history and the chronological fixation of events.
In this manner, then, while the Queen's Chamber,
with its cubit-defining niche, contains cubic inches to
the typical number for that cubit of ten-millionth
earth-reference —the Grand Gallery contains 36 millions
* Mr. Simpson's sums of the squares are not quite so cogent in the
Queen's as the King's Chamber, already given in chapter x. and his ;
radius length for it, 92-17 inches, is not so well proved. The proportions,
however, which are more certain than the absolute lengths, run thus :
Height, divided by radius of chamber . . =z 2- square = 4

Breadth = 2-2361 „ = 5
= =
Length
Sums
Diagonal of end
of the squares .... = 2-4495
3-
.,
,,
=
=
6
l«5
9
Diagonal of side = 3-1623 „ = 10
—
Diagonal of floor
Sums
Solid diagonal
ot the squares .... = 3-3166
3-8730
„
„
:=
=30
= 15
11
Sums of the squares of all the dimensions, except the \

_
~ ^^
major, or gable, or central height of the chamber . )
Major, or gable, or central height . . . = 2-6458 „ = 7

of cubic inches : or one million to every one of the 36

inclined stones forming its long sloping roof.
The number of these Grand Gallery roof-stones had
been given in 1837 at 31 by Colonel Howard-Vyse, and
at 30 by the great French work, so that I was a little
disconcerted in 1865 at finding them 36. But as these
authors gave no particulars, and as I took much pains
(duly described in "Life and Work, "Vol. II, pp. 86—88),
there can be very little doubt about the larger number.
And in 1872, Mr. Simpson seems to confirm it as an
intentional feature of the architect, by finding the round
number of one million cubic inches to be repeated just
36 times in the contents of the whole Grand Galler}',
carefull}^ computed for every overlapping.*
The, Ramps, and the WelVs Upper Mouth.
Let us next attend to the ramps, or inclined stone

benches on either side of the Grand Gallery's floor,
running from the very north end right up to the great
transverse step which forms the south end thereof.
They are alluded to so conflictingly in the great French
work, as containing sometimes 26, and sometimes 28
holes, that I recorded, in " Life and Work," several sets
of measures of various kinds, to set this very simple
point beyond all dispute.
If the ramps are supposed to include the great stone
step at their upper or southern end —
and which stone step
has an almost similar kind of hole at either inner corner
—then there are actually and positively 28 holes, clear
and distinct, along the eastern wall of the Gallery (27
in the ramp and 1 on the step) and there are as
itself, ;
many along the western wall for though the lowest and
;
* Mr. Simpson has a further Bpeculation on the apparently 50-inch

length of each roof-«tone but the lengths having struck mo at the
;
place as irregular, I did not attempt to measure them.

38o OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
nortliernmost hole is not very clear,* that is merely from

part of the ramp which held it having been broken
away. Of these 28, too, on either side, 25, viz., all
except the lowest two, and upper one, are distinguished

by a piece 13 inches broad and 18 high, being
of stone
let into the wall vertically and immediately over them ;
while certain of them are crossed by another piece, giving

them a faint approach to an oblique cruciform aspect.
Something may come of that, in the hands of future
explorers but meanwhile we have to notice another
;
feature, and a most important one, already established

or brought to light hj the removal of part of the ramp-
stone in the lower north-west corner of the Grand
Gallery for the removal of that mass just there, long ago
;
disclosed a constructional secret of the original builders

viz., the upper end, — or rather a small and low outlet
;
leading to the upper end, — of a very deep and solemn

kind of shaft, usually called ''
the well," in the annals
of early Pyramid exploration.
At those times nothing was known of the Pyramid's
down than its junction with
entrance-passage further
Caliph Al-Mamoun's forced hole and the entry to the
first ascending passage. Therefore, when men ventured
to look into the well mouth from the north-western corner
of the Grand Gallery, at, or near, the broken ramp-stone
as above, they found themselves not far from overhang-
ing a dark and dismal abyss, no one knew how deep or
where leading to.
What Caliph Al-Mamoun and his immediate followers

thought of not recorded
it, is but soon after his time,
;
" the well " begins to figure in Arab accounts, as an open

pit of preternatural depth and fearful qualities. A
party of twenty men, from the Faioum district, was once
formed to investigate the mystery, but was frightened
by one of their number falling down the aperture such
a terrible distance, that he was said to have been three
hours in the act, uttering horrible cries all the time ;
and he was never heard of again except in an apocryphal

manner, and as having become an enchanted being.
Again, a Sultan of Cairo, of impatient character, and
determined to know all the secrets of the Great Pyramid
in his own day, elected to blow it up by filling this same
well with gunpowder and only relinquished the design
:
on being assured by his Italian architect, that the explo-

sion of so vast a quantity of powder would endanger the
safety of all the buildings in Cairo.
Again, at a later age, the Cambridge traveller, Dr.
and
Clarke, visited the place with a large military party,
on throwing a stone down the well, and hearing it end
by splashing, as they all considered, in water, he called —
impressive attention to the faithfulness of classic authors,
for had not Pliny mentioned that there was a water-well
in the Great Pyramid, 80 cubits deep and hei*e it was,
;
if not before their eyes, at least within range of their

fallacious ears.
Again, in 1818, Signor Caviglia cleared out the
entrance-passage of the Great Pyramid throughout the
whole distance right down to the deep subterranean
chamber and lo, near the bottom of it, on the western
;
side, was a low door-way leading into a dark passage by :
pushing into which and following its lead, and clamber-

ing in the darkness higher and higher and yet higher,
or 170 feet vertical altogether, he at length found him-
self at the well mouth, and entering the lower north-
west corner of the Grand Gallery. Very thirsty, too, as
well as hot and tired was he, for not a particle of water
existed in any portion of the so-called well the whole ;
of which, including the lower end of the entrance-pas-

sage and the subterranean chamber, is far above the
level of the Nile inundation, the only source of water in
that scorched and almost rainless land.
Again, in 1830 and 1837, came in the age of explora-
tions, i.e., Egyptological and builders' explorations with

Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Colonel Howard- Vyse, and Mr.
Perring. For they set forth, as already indicated, that
the ancient workmen who had filled up with stone plugs
the first ascending passage, must have afterwards escaped
by this long and deep well-like hole, or vertical shaft, to
the lower part of the entrance-passage, and so attained
to the outward air once again.
The Missing Ramp-stone.
Perhaps they But

did. in that case let us ask, " in
what state would they have left the ramp-stone over the
well's mouth ?
Certainly not blown from within outwards, as if by

uncontrollable explosive force, breaking off part of the
wall with it, and leaving the hole's mouth exposed for
;
that would have defeated their whole object. They would,

on the contrary, have contrived a temporary support for
the stone when in a position impending over the hole,
partly in the floor and partly in the wall or a support ;
such, that when the last man had come away, the prop
would be easily withdrawn, and the stone would fall
neatly into a seat already cut for it and cemented round
the edges with freshly-applied lime to make the work
permanent and For then such stone would
secure.
be flush with the rest of the ramp, and would utterly
conceal from any one who should ever enter the
Grand Gallery by the regular method of the first
ascending passage, that there was any well-mouth what-
ever behind the surface of the ramp. (See Plate XIII.)
The original builders, then, were not those who
knocked out, from within on the well side, that now
lost, ramp-stone, and exposed the inlet to the well
mouth as it is presently seen, near the north-west corner
of the Grand Gallery. Neither was Al-Mamoun the
party, forno one could have done it except by entering

the wellfrom the very bottommost depths of the
subterranean region and he, the son of Caliph Haroun
;
Al-Raschid, and all his crew, did not descend further

down the entrance-passage than merely to the level of
his own forced hole, which is not subterranean at all.
Nor is the credit claimed for any of his Arab suc-
cessors, who rather allude to the well as an already
existing feature in their earliest time, and one they
did not understand ; in large part, too, because they
had only and only knew of, the upper end of it in
seen,
the north-west corner of the Grand Gallery floor.
Who then did do it ?
Who indeed For the whole band of Egyptological
!
writers we have mentioned, appear to be convinced that

ages before Caliph Al-Mamoun made his way by blun-
dering and smashing, long ages too before Mohammed
was born, and rather at and about the period of Judah
being carried captive to Babylon, —
the Egyptians them-
selves had entered the Great Pyramid by cunning art
and tolerable understanding of its mere methods of
construction, and had closed it again when they left.
Either some fanatics of the late dynasties of Ethiopic
intruders, or the following Persian conquerors, are con-
sidered to have been those spoilers and sealers-up again :
and not only of the Great, and all the other Pyramids
too, but of every royal tomb throughout Egypt in what-
ever style of architecture it may have been whether
built,
subterranean or subaerial. The and at the
spoilers also
same time of those far more repulsive tombs and bigger
sarcophagi, tlie profanely sacred ones of the deified
Egyptian bull Apis recently brought once more to the
;
notice ofman by Mariette Bey's too successful excava-

tions of ancient idolatries.
Precisely who those men were, as Colonel Howard-
Vyse well remarks, who committed tlint fir«t spoiliTi**
384. OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
*'
will now never be known "
but that the royal tombs
;
were spoiled, and that both early Mohammedan and

later Christian explorers throughout both Upper, and
Lower, Egypt, equally found nothing but emptied sar-
cophagi, is positive matter of fact. By the aid, too, of
features still existing, it can be mechanically demon-
strated how those far earlier men may, in the case of
the Great Pyramid, have descended to the subterranean
depths of its entrance-passage, entered the bottom of the
well, ascended the said well to its mouth, knocked out
part of the closing ramp, ascended the then clear and
open Grand Gallery, entered the King's Chamber, made
what changes they could there and then, descending ;
again the same" way, closed all the passages behind

them so effectually that no one else ever attempted to
follow their steps, until after a lapse of 2,000 years, or
close within our own times.
Of the Sacred, touching the Great Pyramid.
That is the end then of the first use which the Great
Pyramid's Grand Gallery, deep well, but not a water-
well, and entrance-passage served. But .that was evi-
dently not all which those features were intended for.
In the course of the summer of 1872, in a correspon-
dence with Mr. Charles Casey, of Pollerton Castle, Carlow
(then preparing his work " Philitis "*), that straightfor-
ward and vigorous thinker considered himself called on
to tell me, that while he had followed and adopted all
that I had attempted to explain as to the metrology of
the Great Pyramid being of more than human scientific
perfection for the age in which it was produced, yet to —
call it therefore Divinely inspired or sacred, seemed to
him to be either too much, or too little. It might have
* " Philitis : A Disquisition." By Charles Casey, Esq. Published
bv Carson Brothers, Grafton Street, Dublin. 1872.
been sufi&cient in a previous day, but not in these times

in which we live for with rationaUsm continually ex-
;
tending on every side, the only vital question left in

religion, the only question really, efficiently, sacred, is
*'
What think ye of Christ ? Whose son is he ?
" The
question to which we must all of us, sooner or later,
come at last.
"Now," said Mr. Casey, "unless the Great Pyramid
can be shown to be Messianic, as well as fraught with
superhuman science and design, its sacred claim is a ' '
thing with no blood in it it is nothing but mere

;
sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. That idea

seized me the other night," said he, " when I was
thinking on my bed, and took me with such a giant's
grip that I have never been able to get quit of it since."
You man, I was obliged
are not the first Pyramidist
to reply, to whom the same idea has been vouchsafed ;
for it has long formed a matter of frequent and earnest

discussion among several of them but they have not :
published on it yet, thinking the necessary preliminary

part of the subject, or the Pyramid's attestation to
superhuman scientific abilities for its age, not yet
brought up to the required degree of exactness to com-
mand the respect of, and induce assent from, sceptically-
minded men.
At the time I wrote to Mr. Casey, the uncertainties of
the base-side measure of the Great Pyramid, by modern
surveyors, were simply horrible the best of them both
;
erring to any extent between 9,100 and 9,170 inches, and

laying the fault thereof upon the Pyramid. At that time,
therefore, the only solution of the difficulty seemed to
be, to beseech some superlatively rich men to expend of
their spare thousands, first in clearing the four base-sides
of the Great Pyramid from their impracticable hills of
rubbish, and then in measuring between the terminal
points with proper accuracy. And there, at those rich
c c
386. OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part IV.
men's luxurious doors, the matter stood and had ;
stood uncared for by them or treated with base con-

tumely for seven long years, until at last the Pyramid's
purpose could wait no longer. So, partly in 1872, and
still more signally in July, 1873, it passed them all
by and in revealing the reason why the King's Cham-
;
2
ber was made in measured length 41 '132 Pyramid
inches, has shown both the true base-side length and
the vertical height of the structure, its tt theory and
the inch and cubit metrological system, to a degree of
accuracy too, combined with certainty of intention,
''^
which leaves nothing more to desire and makes Great ;
Pyramid studies quite independent henceforth of all

those rich men and their long wasted or squandered or
unused riches, confided to them for some better pur-
pose. They had had, in this Pyramid cause, such an
opportunity of doing high, pure, and noble good to all
the ages, as wealth had never enjoyed before, since the
foundation of the world but the opportunity has from
;
this time departed from them for ever. Wherefore the

least that can be said is in terms of James v. 1^—3,
''Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your
miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are
corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your
gold and silver cankered
is and the rust of them
;
shall be a witness against you." But mankind may

well rejoice, for the flood-gates of the Great Pyramid's
sacred history, or the last pages of what it has to tell,
and has had to tell ever since the beginning of human
life and story, —
are henceforth open to all.
The Sacred pronounced to he Messianic.

It was in 1865 that a letter reached me at the Great
Pyramid, transmitted, with some high recommendations
* Some 700 times more accurate than tlie previous measures on the
ground. (See forward, chap, xxv.)
of its author, by that most upright, knightly man the

late Mr. Kenmure Maitland, Sheriff Clerk of the county
of Edinburgh. **
He is a young ship-builder," said he,
" a son of a ship-builder, an accomplished draughtsman,
and hear that he lately turned out, from his own

I
design, one of the most perfect ships that ever left
Leith Docks from his childhood upwards he has been
:
an intense student of whatever could be procured

concerning the Great Pyramid; and though his family
surname is now Menzies, he has reasons for believing
it to have been originally Manasseh."
This Israelite, then, but no Jew, it was, who first, to

my knowledge, broke ground in the Messianic sym-
bolisms of the Great Pyramid, so intensified sub-
sequently by Mr. Casey : and, after long feeling his way
in a humble and prayerful spirit,'"'" at length unhesi-
tatingly declared that the immense superiority in-
height of the grand gallery over every other passage]
in the Great Pyramid, arose from its representing thel
Christian Dispensation, white the passages typified only
human-devised n^ligions, human histories, or little else.
From the north ])eginning of the Grand Gallery floor,
said Robert Menzies, there, in southward procession,

begin the years of the Saviour's earthly life, expressed
at the rate of a Pyramid inch to a year. Tliree-and
thirty inch-years therefore, or thereabout, bring us right\
• « that mo«t mysterious edifice, the Great Pyramid, which has been
a puzzle to all ag^'s. It in a very serious view indeed which I entertain of
its purix)se, and not one to be approached in a spirit of levity. I have
endeavoured, hiri^dy led by a careful perusal of Mr. Taylor's book, and
your own upon iho subject, to follow out much further than you do, the
Scriptural alluHioim to the Great Pyramid, with a result which appears,
slightly as I hnvf iiij.p«;d into it, truly astonishing?. Extreme cauticm in
requiHito in Hiblicil lesearth, for, as Peter says, • No scripture is tf
private iiit<v'"' '•'!'
» I have humbly and prayerfully ondtavoured to
avoid anyi ii may bo misconstrued, and if my humble remarks

are of any to you in the elucidation of this grand and holy
mystery, I uhiJl U» truly glad.
(Signed) "RouBUT Mbnzibs.
"8ba Cot, Lbith, February 2bth, 18G6."
\over against the mouth of the well, the type of His

death, and His glorious resurrection too while the ;
long, lofty Grand Gallery shows the dominating rule in

the world of the blessed religion which He established
thereby, over-spanned above by the 36 stones of His
months of ministry on earth, and defined by the floor-
length in inches, as to its exact period. The Bible
fully studied, shows that He intended that first Dispen-
sation to last only for a time ; a time too which may
terminate very much sooner than most menand expect,
shown by the southern wall impending.
Whereupon I went straight to the south wall of the
Grand Gallery, and found that it was impending by ;
the quantity too, if that interests any one, of about 1°

while the Coventry clinometer I was measuring with,
was capable of showing 10";* and where Mr. Menzies
could have got that piece of information from, I cannot
imagine for the north wall is not impending he, too,
; :
was never at the Great Pyramid, and I have not seen

the double circumstance chrctoicled elsewhere. The first
ascending passage, moreover, he explained as representing

the Mosaic Dispensation. I measured it and found it
to be, from the north beginning of the Grand Gallery,
-
the natal year of Christ, to its junction with the roof of

the entrance passage northward and below, or to some
period in the life of Moses, 1,483 Pyramid inches : and
when produced across that passage, so as to touch its
floor, 1,542 inches.
* See " Life and Work," vol. ii. p. 90.

t The Rev. W. B. Galloway, M.A.,Vicar of St. Mark's, Eegent's Park,
in his "Egypt's Eecord of Time to the Exodus of li^rael," after deeply
studying the question, more from Alexandrian Greek than Egyptian pro-
fane, sources, makes the date of the Exodus 1540 B.C. see his p. 371. And
;
at p. 429 he arrives at the conclusion, that the birth of our Saviour was
actually in the course of our reckoned year b.c. 1, and needs only a
fraction of a year to make the dates a.d., as usually given, truly con-
tinuous with the patriarchal.
The Floor Roll of Human Religious History.
But the chief line of human history with Robsrt

Menzies was the floor of the entrance-passage. Begin-
ning at it^s upper and northern end, it starts at the rate 1
of a Pyramid inch to a year, from the Dispersion of'

mankind, or from the period when men declined any
longer to live the patriarchal life of Divine instruction,
and insisted on going off upon their own inventions
when they immediately began to experience that uni-
versal " foAjilis descensus Averni " of all idolaters ;
and which is so sensibly represented to the very life
or death, in the long-continued descent of the entrance-

passage of the Great Pyramid, more than 4,000 inch-
years long, until it ends in the symbol of the bottomless)
pit, a chamber deep in the rock, well finished as to itsi
ceiling and top of its walls, but without any attempt at|
a floor .
One escape, indeed, there was in that long and f
mournful history' of human decline ;but for a few only,

[
when Exodus took place in the first-ascending

the
passage, which leads on into the Grand Gallery show- ;
ing Hebraism ending in its original prophetic destination

— Christianity. But another escape was also eventually
provided, to prevent any immortal soul being necessarily
lost in the bot tomless pit for before reaching that
;
dismal abyss, there is a possible entrance, though it

may be by a strait and narrow way, to the one and
only gate of sjilvation through the death of Christ
— viz., the well representing his descent into Hades :
not the bottondess pit of idolaters and the wicked at

the lowest point to which the entrance-pa.ssage subter-
raneously descends, but a natural grotto rather than
artificial chamber in the course of the well's furtlier
progress to the other place ; while the stone which
once covered that well's upper mouth is blown out-
wards into the Grand Gallery with excessive force (and

was once so thrown out, and is now annihilated), car-
rying part of the wall with it, and indicating how
totally unable was the grave to hold Him beyond the
appointed time.
That sounds fair and looks promising enough, so far,
said Mr. Casey but it is not enough yet to be the
;
turning-point with me, when interests so immense are

at stake. We must have more than that, and some-
thing not less convincing than a proof of this order.
Measuring along the passages backward from the north
beginning of the Grand Gallery, you find the Exodus at
either 1483 or 1542 B.C., and the dispersion of man-
kind in 2528 B.C., up at the beginning of the entrance-
passage. Now
you have already published, years ago,
that you have computed the date of building of the
Great Pyramid, by modern astronomy, based on the
Pyramid's own star-pointings, and have found it 2170
B.C. That date, according to this new theory, must be
three or four hundred inches down inside the top or
mouth of the entrance-passage. Is there then any jnark
at that point ? for I feel sure that the builder, if really
inspired from on High, would have known how many
years were to elapse between his great mechanical work
in the beginning of the world, and the one central
act of creation in the birth of the Divine Son and he ;
would have marked it there as the most positive and

invaluable proof that he could give, of the truly Divine
inspiration under which the building had been planned
and executed ?
The Crucial Test.
Now it had never occurred to me before to confront

\
the sacred and scientific theories in this manner ; the
idea was Mr. Casey's entirely. But if any trial was ever
Chap. XX.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 39
to be considered a crucial one, surely it was this. So

away I went to my original notes to satisfy him and ;
beginning at the north end of the Grand Gallery,

counted and summed up the length of every stone back-
ward all down the first ascending passage, th^n across
the entrance-passage to its floor, then up its floor-plane
towards its mouth, and soon saw that the 2,170 B.C.
would fall very near a most singular portion of the
passage —^viz., a place where two adjacent wall-joints,
similarly too on either side of the passage, were
or nearly so
vertical, while every other wall-joint
;
both above and below was rectangular to the length

of the passage, and therefore largely inclined to the
vertical.
This double joint most easy to see, though
fact, in itself
not, I believe, recorded before 1865, has frequently since

then been speculated on by various persons as possibly
pointing to some still undiscovered chamber just as ;
the diagonal joints in the floor at a lower level, are now

clearly seen to point to the upper ascending passage
and all that it leads to. But while no such fourth
.
chamber has yet been discovered, and no Egyptologist

attempts to give any explanation of the anomalous
joints, they seemed from their upright position, —
at least
to one who believed from theory that they were very near,
and shortly before, the Great Pyramid's date of building,
— to have something representative of setting up, or
preparations for the erecting of a building. And we
are toldby Herodotus, that many preliminary years luere
consumed in preparing the stones and subterraneous
excavations of the Great Pyramid while Dr. Lepsius
;
assures us, in modern times, with all the lights, what-

ever they may be, of the Egyptologists, that preliminary
preparation was never practised by any chance, in any
all ordinary Egyptian pyramid building.
case whatever, of
For their work was Epi-methean only, or from hand to
moutli, year by year, and each year in itself and by

itself only.
Neither of these ^'icasi-vertical joints, however, would
exactly suit the 2170 B.C. date; they were both of
them tob early. But on the surface of the stone fol-
lowing the last of them, and containing the 2,170
distance within its length, there was a more unique
marking still.Something it was, more retiring, more
difficult to discover,and yet commending itself still
more when discovered, though not having the slightest
approach to either letter of language, or form of drawing,
and certainly not to any species of idolatry.
This mark was a line, nothing more, ruled on the
stone, from top to bottom of the passage wall, at right
angles to its floor. Such a line as might be ruled with
a blunt steel instrument, but by a master-hand for
power, evenness, straightness, and still more eminently
for rectangularity to the passage axis. I had made
myself a large square at the Pyramid in 1865, a wooden
square well trussed and nearly the whole height of the
wall, and therewith tested the error of rectangularity of
every masonry joint therein and in every case had
;
found some very sensible quantity of such error but ;
on coming to the ruled line, I could find no certainly

sensible error there. If I suspected it occasionally, a
and there proved that heat
reversal of the square then
or strain had caused some temporary twist in my in-
strument's wooden frame but it could positively and
;
permanently accuse the ancient line on the stone, of

nothing wrong.*
There was one such line on either wall, the west and
the east, of the passage and the two lines seemed to
;
be pretty accurately opposite each other while the ;
two pair of g^tas^-vertical joints were not exactly so ;
* See "Life and Work," vol. ii. p. 29.

and the other joints in the walls pretended to, and

generally had, no correspondence whatever. All things,
therefore, both in symmetry, beauty of truth, and
correctness of position, culminated in favour of these two
thin lines viz., the one anciently ruled line on the west
;
wall, and the similarly ruled line on the east wall and ;
I looked at them with still more interest afterwards,

when there appeared good reason to consider them the
work of the very same hand that laid out, in Pvome-
thean manner, the entire proportions of the whole Great
Pyramid. For when Messrs. Alton and Inglis excavated
and (with my assistance) laid bare the south-west socket
of the Great Pyramid
in April, 1865, —
there, upon the
fairwhite flattened face of the said socket rock, while
three sides were formed by raised edges of stone, the
fourth and outer side was defined simply by a line ;
but a line ruled apparently by the very same hand and

selfsame tool which had also drawn these other truthful
lines in the entrance-passage.
Yet though I had admired these lines so much,
witness the passes of " Life and Work," published in
18G7, — I had never thought of them before in connec-
tion with possible indications of date, or, indeed, of
anything else, by virtue of their precise and absolute
jylace ; and hence it was, that when Mr. Casey required
in 1872 to know exactly where, on the floor, the line
on either side tcjuched that plane (measured, too, not
from the toj) of the entrance-passage comparatively close
by on the north, but from the beginning of the Grand
Gallery far away to the south), there was no rejidy
prepared record to say. That is, nothing more than
the reading's of the masonry joints next above and
below the spot, together with a mere memorandum
that the ruled line was within " a few inches " of one
of them. Every intervening measure by joints be-
tween the two extremes, and over scores of joints, had
been procured, printed, and published to the world in

1867; but just the last item required, merely the
small distance from the nearest joint to the drawn
line, was wanting. (See Plate XYII.)
So I wrote out to my friend Mr. Waynman Dixon,

C.E., then (1872) actively engaged in erecting his
brother's bridge over the Nile, near Cairo, requesting
him to have the goodness to make and send me careful
measures of the distance, whatever he should find it to
be, of the fine line on either passage wall at the Pyra-
mid, from the nearest one of the two gitasi- vertical
joints ;not giving him any idea what the measure was
wanted for, but only asking him to be very precise,
clear, and accurate. And so he was taking out also;
as companion and duplicate measurer his friend Dr.

Grant, of Cairo and their doubly attested figures were
;
sent to me on diagrams, where they were written into

their places, in a manner which left no room for any
misunderstanding.
With this piece of difference measure thus happily
obtained at so late a date, I set to work again on my
older joint measures of the whole distance and was ;
almost appalled when, on applying the above difference,

the east side gave forth 2170*5, and the west side
2 170 -4 Pyramid inches.
" This testimony satisfies me and fills me with
thankfulness, and joy," wrote Mr. Casey ; while I,
never expecting to have measured so closely as that,

along either side of those lengthy, dark and sloping
Pyramid passages (where the measuring- rods, if not
tightly held by hand to the floor, have a knack of
slipping away and shooting down to the bottom), I,
not understanding how such apparently close agreement
came about, and knowing that it was not my desert,
can only conclude this chapter with a condensed,
small-type representation of the figure work involved

in bringing out the results ; results more laboriously,
and also, perhaps, more rigidly, impartially, and un-
exceptionally gained, than can well be imagined by any
one else without going through some conspectus of the
many details.
THE RULED LINES IN THE ENTRANCE PASSAGE OF THE

GREAT PYRAMID,
TESTED FOR THEIR DISTANCE PROM THE NORTH BEGINNING OF THE
GRAND GALLERY, AND FOR THE CRITICAL NUMBER
2170.
The measures of these lines from the nearest masonry joint, were \
kindly sent to me by Mr. Waynman Dixon, from Egypt, with attestations 1
by his friend, Dr. Grant, of Cairo, on August 19, 1872, thus :
" East Wall — Entrance Passage.

" Distance of Ruled Line from masonry wall joint north of it,
at the top of the wall . . = 13-25 British in.

at the bottom of the wall . . = 4-37 „
**
West Wall —Entrance Passage.
" Distance of Ruled Line from masonry wall joint north of it,
at the top of the wall . . = 17 '80 British in.

at the bottom of the wall . . = 7*55 „
•*The above distances were measured by Mr. Waynman Dixon, C.E.,

and checked by Dr. Grant," and were accompanied by drawings showing
that the lines were assumed to be rectangular (which they are) to the
length of the passage, while the masonry joints they were referred to
were nearly vertical, and were the southernmost members of a pair of
such $^%«»t- vertical joints on either wall.
Examination for Accuracy.

The above measures are generally agreeable to my own approximate
indication of the position of the lines, though I was rather surprised to
find by Mr. Dixon's numbers, that the line on the west wall is farther from
its reterence joint, than that on the east wall is from its reference joint
there, by so large an amount as nearly 4 inches.
It became therefore prudent, before embarking in any speculation on
the whole return, to make an independent inquiry into the degree of
accuracy of Mr. Dixon's measures, in one feature at least, where they
admitted of that wholesome scientific discipline.
Accordingly, if we subtract, in the case of each wall separately,
Mr. Dixon's lower difference reading from the upper, we attain a ditierence
of the differences, East =8-88 inches, and West =
10*25 inches. And
on the assumption of the lines being rectangular to the length of the
passage, those residual quantities show how much ihQJo%nts deviate from
396 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Paut rv.
rectangularity towards verticality, as measured along the top of the wall

or they form the shortest side of a plane triangle, of which the longest
side is the gwase- vertical joint, and the medium side the transverse height
of the wall, equivalent to the length of the ruled line.
Now the shortest side of that triangle I did in a manner measure in
1865 for in pp. 29 and 30 of vol. ii. of " Life and Work," the deviation
;
of each of the said ^-wasi- vertical joints (from rectangularity towards ver-
ticality) is stated as being, or amounting to, at the top of the wall, 1st, —
by an approximate method :
The east ^Masi-vertical joint . . . = 8 ± a: inches,
And the west „ . . . z=. ^ ±_ x inches.

2nd, by a more accurate method —
The east 5^?-âsi- vertical joint
And the west „
:
....::=
. . . . rz
9*1 inches,
10*4 inches;
while the line ruled on the east wall deviated from rectangularity by only
0-04 inch, and that on the west wall by less than 0-01 of an inch.
Now Mr. Dixon's numbers for the same two joints' deviations being
For the east 5'«<J5{- vertical joint . . . r=: 8 88 inches,
And for the west „ . , . = 10-25 inches,
they come between my

two pairs of quantities, and closer to that pair of
them which was previously stated to be by the more accurate method.
The result of examination is therefore highly gratifying, and shoM's that
we may certainly depend on Mr. Dixon's measures, say, to the tenth of an
inch, at least ; and that is no more than the fortieth part of the apparently
anomalous difference of his absolute distances of each line from its nearest
joint at the bottom of its own wall.
That difference, then, of the absolute distances must be a real quantity
at the Pyramid ; and the line on the west wall must be actually 4 inches
or so further from the joint there, than that one on the east wall is from
the joint there. Wherefore much may perhaps depend at last on what
effect such large difference may have, in modifying the final result on a
certain whole quantity which has now, after a repose of several years,
been suddenly required, in order to furnish a test for a new hypothesis.
Trial of Mr. Casey* s Hypothesis.
Mr. Casey had thus far simply announced, that to fulfil certain important
theoretical ends, the passage floor distance in the Great Pyramid (measured
from the north end of the Orand Gallery, down the floor of the first
ascending, and up the floor of the entrance-passage, to where that floor is
at last touched on either side by the lower ends of these two ancientl)'
ruled wall lines) should amount to 2,170 Pyramid inches, neither more
nor less within the probable errors of measurement.
At present I need only state that tlie north end of the Grand Gallery is
a very well preserved and sharply defined plane ; a good starting-point
therefore for measures and that, excepting some rather troublesome, but
;
by no means impossible, features at the junction of the two passages, the

whole distance is plain, clear, and perfectly amenable to modern measure.
Indeed every inch of the way (excepting only the small piece now
supplied by Mr. Dixon) has been, at one time or another, measured by
me, and its chief portion even two or three times over, and on either
side of the passages, with results too which have heen published before the
world for five years. The numerical facts therefore are, so i'ar, very firm
and if the measures, as originally taken, have as yet only been presented
tinywhere piecemeal, and with numbers increasing in two difi"erent serie*
from north to south, in place of, as now required, in one long accumulation
—
from south to north that is an additional guarantee that the measures
taken in 1865 could riot have been influenced by any desire to bring out
the result of Mr. Casey's hypothesis in 1872.
We proceed therelore to the first portion of the whole distance now
demanded, viz., from the north end of the Grand Grallery, down the floor of
the first ascending passage, until that floor produced cuts the opposing
floor of the entrance-passage. This poriion we may call a.
The elements for the length a are given in " Life and Work," vol. ii.,
in the shape,
1st. Of the floor distances, in British inches, joint by joint, from a
specified joint near the lower end, up to the terminal joint at the upper or
southern end of the first ascending passage, and they have been measured
twice over by me on either side of the passage.
2ud. The portcullis length, from that lower specified joint downwards
to the still lower butt-end of portcullis, measured only once, and on the
east side of the passage only.
3rd. The distance from that lower butt-end, slantingly across the
entrance-passage to its floor, in the direction of the opposing floor of the
first ascending passage produced downwards, and given here in three
portions, each of which has been measured on either side of the passage.
The following Table contains all these distances required for a, and
they are finally reduced from British, to Pyramid, inches in the two right-
hand columns.
Table I.
Floor- JOINT from north beginning of Grand Gallery, towards lower

distances
end offirst ascending passage ; or complements of the numbers in third
columns of pages 48 atid 49 of ^^ Life and Work," vol. ii.
4
But this portion b we must necessarily compute in two steps ; first, in
Table II., setting forththe readings of all 'Ci\%Jioor joints of the entrance-
passage on the floor, the supposed sheet of, or for, historic record and ;
second, in Table III., setting forth first for the east side, and then for
the west side, the readings of every wall joint, on the floor's above de-
scribed record plane this will be the b which we are in search of; and
;
will have a added to it in the two last columns, so as there to present the
quantity A -j- b, for the wall-joints in the entrance-passage.
Finally, to the wall-joint reading A -|- b, for the particular joint mea-
sured from by Mr. Waynman Dixon, we must apply his measured dif-
ference of the lower end of the ruled line therefrom.
N.B. —Had Mr. Waynman Dixon measured the lower end of the ruled
lines from a jôor-joint, we should now have been in a position, with this
table, to have obtained for each ruled line the ultimate reading required.
But his measure of a difference being from a wall-]omt, we must now
prepare a further tabular representation of the readings, on the floor-plane,
of each of the wâ^^-joints, and this for either wall separately ; or thus :
Table III.
Wall-joikt distancesot their lower ends ; or where they touch the floor in the
Entrance Passage reckoned from that floor's contact plane with
; the
floor of first ascending passage {produced downwards) ^ and proceeding
upwards to the upper or north end of Entrance Passage.
EAST WALL (by itself).

^ WEST WALL (
402 THE GREAT PYRAMID. [Part IV.
Or exhibiting an agreement with the hypothesis to less than s^footh part

of the whole ; and one side agreeing with the other to within 2ooo"oth of
the whole.
This is a much closer degree of approach than I had expected my
measures were capable of, or still think they deserve and I should have
;
had some scruple in publishing the case, had not the whole of the data
been so perfectly impossible to have been knowingly influenced at the time
they were made, printed, and published.
But I must leave it to the candid reader to say, whether the rest of this
book's contents tend to raise that one case of agreement above or below
simple coincidence only.
PAET Y.
INEVITABLE CONCLUSIONS.
" HOW SAY YE UNTO PHARAOH, I — THE SON OF THE WISE, THE SON OF
ANCIENT KINGS ?
" WHERE ARE THEY ? WHERE ARE THY WISE MEN ? AND LET THEM TELL
THEE NOW, AND LET THEM KNOW WHAT THE LORD OF HOSTS HATH PUR-
—
POSED UPON EGYPT." ISAIAH XIX., 11, 12.
CHAPTER XXI
HIEROLOGISTS AND CHEONOLOGISTS.
^0 land has been so variously treated in chronology

as the valley ofEgypt for even if the early mysti-
;
cisms of so-called divine kings during 36,500 years be

exploded, there are equally extraordinary modern
theories. By some of the rationalistic writers on, and
inventors of, history, for instance, in latter times, the
earliest Egyptian kings have been pushed forward far
above all monumental dates up to 10,000, 20,000, and
even 300,000 years ago with the accompanying state-
;
ment, too, that even at that remote epoch there were no

signs of any gradual emergence out of a primitive savage
condition, but only of an already highly organised and
well-governed community, which must therefore on the
human hypothesis, have commenced to run its civilized
course an infinite length of time previously.
More recently still, not only have geologists claimed
to have discovered proofs (in fragments of pottery dug
up at a great depth in the alluvial deposit of the Nile)
of an existence of first-rate human manufactures there
during more than 13,000 consecutive years but there
;
are many very worthy men who still attach much im-
portance to the computajiions made, astronomically,
from certain configurations of the ecliptic and equator
in the celebrated zodiacs of the Nilotic temples of
Dendera, Esneh, and E' Dayr.
r
4o6 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part V.
The first class of authors mentioned, in a great mea-

sure, either stand or fall with the two latter ; and upon
the proofs, more or less material, which they have been
supposed to offer in confirmation of their theories.
Now, of the geological evidence, it has lately been
argued by the acute Professor Balfour Stewart, of
Owen's College, Manchester, that a solid mass of any
substance of notable size, has an effective tendency to
work its way downwards through a bed of finely-
divided particles of both similar, and extraneous, matter
wherefore it is no positive proof, ages after a big bone,
or piece of pottery, or flint hammer of comparatively
large dimensions, was deposited on a certain soil, that
it should be of the same date as the smaller particles of
the stratum it is subsequently found in for it may ;
have worked its way downwards while these particles

were still mobile.
This law its author illustrated in the case of celts im-
mersed in finely-divided silex powder and if it is true at
;
all, it must be especially applicable to the later Egyptian
geology. For there, all the valley is not only composed

of the so-called slime of the Nile (microscopically fine
particles of granite, porphyry, limestone, and the other
rocks washed and rolled over by the mighty river in its
long course from the equator), but is visited every year
by the inundation which may be regarded as a grand
;
tide of a secular order, producing amongst the slime's

small component particles the same sort of lively quick-
sand effect, but in a superior degree, which is witnessed
on the Goodwin Sands, whenever an ordinary periodical,

or only twelve-hour, tide rises there.
The geological evidence, then, for a very long
chronology, under such circumstances, is specious in
the extreme ; while the supposed astronomical, is con-
siderably worse ; having even had a decided refutation
given to its very essence, through means of recent
Chap. XXL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 407
hieroglyphical readings, and in this way. The painted

Egyptian zodiacs already alluded to, no matter how
grossly they caricatured the positions of the stars, had
been fondly considered, by those who sought a high
antiquity for Egypt, to have been invariably constructed
so as to represent something in the heavens as seen in
their own day and if they were found to have made a
;
very badly drawn equator crossing the ecliptic, equally

murdered, 180° from its present position, that was taken
as a proof that the ceiling, or the walls containing those
things must have been sculptured when the equator did
cross the ecliptic in that longitude ; i.e., 12,900 years
ago, according to the now known rate of the precession
of the equinoxes in good Newtonian astronomy.
But this is plainly no scientific proof for any stone- ;
mason can at any time, if you give him an order so to

do, and a pattern to go by, carve you a zodiac with the
equator crossing the ecliptic in any constellation what-
ever and with vastly more scientific accuracy of detail
;
than any of those profane Egyptian temple pictures

have yet been accused of.
There was never, therefore, any real stability in the
groundwork for those pseudo-astronomically computed
chronologies ; while during the last thirty years the
whole of such false growth has been felled to the
ground, by the successive discoveries of the new hiero-
logists.Young, ChampoUion, and their followers who ;
have proved incontestably, by interpreting the hiero-

glyphic inscriptions mixed up with the pictures, that
the zodiac temples were the latest of all the Egyptian
monuments that they dated only from the time of
;
the late Ptolemies, and even some of the Roman

emperors and were the work of house-painters rather
;
than astronomers.
Had hieroglyphic study, therefore, done nothing else
than demolish the absurd antiquity given, on mistaken
4o8 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt V.
grounds, to the astronomico-idolatrous Egyptian temples

of late date, it would have deserved well of mankind ;
but has done more than that, though perhaps not

it
quite so much, nor always quite so well, as its ardent

students have claimed for it.
Egyptian Hieroglyphics versus Greek Scholarship.
Commenced by the discovery of the Rosetta stone in

1802 vivified by Young and Champollion
; about
1820 and, since then, most ably developed by Rossel-
;
lini, Gardner Wilkinson, Birch, Osburn, Lepsius, Poole,

l)e Saulcey, De Rougd, Brugsch, Mariette, and many
others, —
hieroglyphical interpretation has rendered the
nineteenth century vastly more intimately acquainted
with the home life of early Egypt, than any century has
been since the times of actual Apis and Osiris worship-
ping by the Egyptians themselves.
The sudden ability thus acquired, to read the writings
of a people who departed all visible life nearly two
thousand years ago, infused at the time extraordinary
enthusiasm into all the hieroglyphic students who ;
congratulated each other, and ancient Egypt too, un-

ceasingly, on the treasure-house of human wisdom which
they had so successfully opened up.
" Dark," said they
"Dark has been thy night,

Ob, Egypt but the flame
!
Of new-born science gilds thine ancient name."
And how does that science gild it ? Not by having set

forth any grand philosophy or estimable literature; for
such things are so very far from existing in the hiero-
glyphics, that at last the late Sir George Cornewall
Lewis, impatient of the Egyptological boastings, and

judging of what had been produced, from his favourite
stand-point of Greek authors, —
both condemned all the
Mizraisms which had up to that time been inter-
preted and concluded from their sample, that there is
;
nothing wôrthy of being known remaining to be inter-

preted in all the rest of the hieroglyphics of the
reputedly vnse land of Egypt.
So if there is anything worth gilding at all, it is
perhaps rather to be looked for in chronology than

literature ; Egyptians were, of all men, the
for the
record the early world
keepers of not only per- :
petually erecting monuments, but inscribing them all

over with their clearly-cut-out hieroglyphic inscrip-
tions w^hile the dry climate of their country has
;
preserved even to these times almost whatever they

chose to inscribe, large or small.
Yet after years of study, our great Egyptologic and
hieroglyphic scholars are agreed on nothing chrono-
logical, except something like the order of precedence,
or comparative succession, of old Egyptian kings, and
dynasties of kings ; —for when they come to give the
absolute dates of any of the reigns, they differ among
themselves by 1,000, 2,000, 8,000 or more years wdth
the utmost facility, just as they choose to consider the
literary dynasties of Manetho more or less successive,
rather than coexistent, in different cities or provinces
of ancient Eg^^pt.
But while Manetho, though an Egyptian priest, was
not contemporary with the most critical times he alludes
to (having lived under the Macedonian subjugation of
his country, and his work having only come down to
us in fragmentary quotations in late monkish authors),
certain good Greek scholars amongst ourselves (men
who would have been thoroughly approved of by Sir
G. C. Lewis), have, after studying the purely Alexandrian
410 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part V.
writers most deeply and extenshêly, and at those historic

periods when they declare hieroglyphics were still inti-
mately and generally understood in that land, they —

have, I repeat, raised the standard of opposition against
the modern soi-disant Egyptologists, or ChampoUionist
interpreters of the monumental inscriptions ; and op-
pose both the order, and absolute dates, as well as the
names for the early Egyptian kings and chief events,
as usually given by those gentlemen.*
Of the whole merits of this grand contest, neither is
this book the place, nor myself the author, wherein and
by whom, it should be discussed. But there are certain
of the results, from either side, which cannot be passed
by, in connection with our proper Great Pyramid sub-
ject.
Differential Chronology of the Egyptologists.
When the Egyptologists, for instance, confess, as they

have done most distinctly even within the last year,
that they know, amongst all their profane monuments
of Old Egypt, not a single one capable of expressing, or
giving, in its inscription an absolute date, while we have
seen abundantly from what is already set forth in this
book, that the Great Pyramid does assign its absolute date
most distinctly, and more and more distinctly the higher
science it is examined by, —
evidently an invaluable
type of separation has been ascertained between the one
Christianly sacred monument in Egypt on one hand,
and, on the other, the whole herd of that land's
profane monuments, the only research -ground which our
modern Egyptologists seem to care for.
* See " Egypt's Kecord of Time to the Exodus of Israel," critically

investigated by the Rev. W. B. Gralloway, M.A., Vicar of St. Mark's,
Regent's Park, London.
1
Again, while the leading principle, and very sheet-

anchor, of the best Egyptological-chronologists is, to
seek out and confide in " ^monuments ; " to consider
nothing fixed in Egyptian history or fact, unless there
is a monument and that monument contem-
to show,
porary, or nearly so, with the facts to which it relates,
— they allow faithfully that they know of no monuments
whatever, earlier by more than a very few years, even if
by so much, than the Great Pyramid.
Dr. Lepsius is very clear on this point. In his
" Letters from Egypt," he wrote from the tombs before
the Great Pyramid in 1843

—
''Nor have I yet found
:
a single cartouche that can be safely assigned to a period

previous to the fourth dynasty. The builders of the
Great Pyramid seem to assert their right to form the
commencement of monumental history, even if it be
clear that they were not the first builders and monu-
mental writers." And again, he says, " The Pyramid
of Cheops, to which the first link of our whole monu-
mental history is fastened immovably, not only for
Egyptian, but for universal history/' And in his great
work of illustrations, the " Denkmaeler " of subsequent
years, the Doctor adheres to the above view, and opens
that immense chronological series with the Great
Pyramid.
Hence we may dismiss entirely all the 300,000 years
of civilisedlife in Egypt before the Great Pyramid, as
rashly asserted by a late rationalistic writer, because he

has no " monuments " to show for that long period.
But for such period as the Egyptologists do bring up
monuments viz., from the Great Pyramid downwards,
;
almost without a break, —

there we can hardly but pay
some attention to their schemes of the differential
chronologic history of Egypt, and which they place
variously thus :
Beginning of each Dynasty of Angient Egypt, according to various

Egyptological Scholars, guided partly by Manetho, whose own
book they have not and partly by the monuments, which they
;
confess do not give absolute dates.
Date according to the Average of
Number
of Lepsius,
Dynasty. Lesueur,
Bunsen,
Mariette,
Fergusson,
Eenan, &c.
&c.
B c.
6735
5472
5170
4956
4472
10
11 3435
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19 1314
20
Chap. XXT.] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 41
of them, viz., William Osburn, for lie makes the fourth

dynasty to extend from 2228 to 2108 B.C.
On finding this solitary case of agreement, in the
course of 1866, I immediately obtained a copy of that
author's two-volume work, '' Monumental History of
Egypt ;" and was so well satisfied with the vigour and
originality of his mind, his linguistic power, and his
conscientious labours, that I sought out every other
work that he had written and was eventually rewarded
;
with a long correspondence with himself; and found

him a man who, though he did not please his fellow-
Egyptologists, yet seemed worthy to be regarded as the
king of them all. Partly, too, by the light of his
writings, reading Lepsius and Howard- Vyse over again,
I am now enabled to give the following comparative, but
still only approximate, view of the Great Pyramid
among the other pyramids of Egypt, and in probable
date, as well as shape, size, and position, {êe Table.)
The Great Sphinx.
And now it may be remarked by anxious readers, that

though I have said so much about the Great Pyramid,
and something touching almost every other pyramid
in Egypt also,— I have said nothing about the Sphinx.
That was just what the Reviewers wrote against Pro-
fessor Greaves after the publication of his Pyramidogra-
phia, 230 years ago. Though indeed one of his querists
presently answers himself, by supposing, that the Pro-
fessor must have found at the place, that the said Sphinx
had in reality no connection with the Great Pyramid.
Exceedingly right, too, was the critic in that sup-
position; for not only has the oval of a king, one
thousand years and several dynasties later than the
date of the Great Pyramid, been found unexceptionably
—
upon the Sphinx, but that monster, an idol in itself,
witlisymptoms typifying the lowest mental organiza-

with anti-Great Pyramid idolatry
tion, positively reeks
throughout its substance for when the fragments or
;
component masses of its colossal stone beard were dis-

covered in the sand excavations of 1817, it was per-
ceived that all the internally joining surfaces of the
blocks had been figured full of the animal-headed gods

of the most profane Egjrpt.
Strange therefore that Dean Stanley's professional eye
should have seen in so soul-repulsive a creature, " with,"
as he himself further and more objectively describes,
*'its vast projecting wig, its great ears, the red colour
still on its cheeks, and the immense projection
visible
of the whole lower part of its face," —
an appropriate
guardian to the Sethite, and most anti-Cainite, Great
Pyramid, whose pure and perfect surface of blameless
stone, eschews every thought of idolatry and sin.
The Recent Discovery about the Sphinx.
But the reign of the Great Sphinx over the souls of

some men, is not over yet.
Long since I had remarked that there is no agree-
ment possible between the Great Sphinx and the Great
Pyramid. Those who admire the one, cannot appre-
ciate the other.
As a rule, it is Frenchmen and Roman Catholics
(though there are happily brilliant exceptions amongst
them), who get up the most outrageous enthusiasm for
the Sphinx and it was given to one of these lately, in the
;
person of the eminent Mariette Bey, to set the w^hole

world agog (for a time) with a supposed monumental
proof that the Sphinx, instead of belonging, as hitherto
so generally supposed, to the 11thor loth Dynasty,
was far older than the Great Pyramid in the 4th
Dynasty and was in fact so ancient, that it had be-
;
come an object of dilapidated, but revered, antiquity

in the times of King Cheops himself, who immortalised
his name, in his very primeval day, by repairing it.
The latest description of this case by Mariette Bey
himself, is at p. 211 of the fourth edition of his Cata-
logue of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities at Boulak.
No. 581 is there spoken of as "a fragmentary stone,
which may be supposed to have formed once part of a
wall, of a certain building, or temple, some problematical
ruins only of which have been found near one of the
small pyramids on the east side of the Great Pyramid."
The stone is abundantly inscribed with little hierogly-
phics "in good preservation but of mediocre style,''
;
euphuistically puts in Mariette Bey, — but, " Tnore like

scratches than anything else,'' writes my plain-speaking
friend, Dr. Grant of Cairo.
This circumstance of bad, or of no, style, or of an
idle modern scribble in place of a serious piece of deep
and well-performed ancient sculpture, which carries
great weight withit in monumental research, — is not
represented in the version of the inscription given with
honour (and with well-cut hieroglyphic types from other
models) by Dr. Birch in the last volume of Bunsen's
" Egypt's Place in History." For the Doctor prints
good, thick-set, well-formed, hieroglyphics, looks only
to one possible interpretation of them, and adopts that
with positivism. No wonder either, in some respects
for a great day it must have been for the idolatries of
old Egypt and its latter day, not worshippers, only
sympathetic admirers, when Mariette Bey first published
There is
his discovery of this astonishing inscription.
good news in it for almost every one of the Mizraite
false gods so that all profanely devout readers may
;
learn with thrilling interest that the images of the

hawk of Horus and the ibis of Thoth, in that pro-
blematical temple, of which this single stone may be
41 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part Y.
supposed to have once formed a part, were of wood

gilt the boat of the " three times beautiful Isis " was
;
in gilt wood with incrustations of jewels that the ;
principal statue of Isis was in gold and silver the ;
statue of Nephthys in bronze gilt, and &c., &c., as to

many other ordinary idols but surpassing words of
;
admiration and adoration were added touching the

Great Sphinx of Horem-Kou, the biggest idol of all,
and declared to be situated just to the south of the
" Temple of Isis, the Ruler of the Great Pyramid."
On showing this version of the inscription to Mr.
Osburn, he instantly pronounced it to be an anachro-
nism; it had, he said, nothing to do contemporaneously
with Cheops, or the 4 th Dynasty either it was merely ;
a rigmarole by certain revivifiers of the ancient Egyp-

tian idolatry, with additions, under the late 26 th
Dynasty.
But William Osburn was a firm believer in the Divine
inspiration of the Bible, and the rebellious human
origin of the Egyptian gods; that they had been in-
vented, as very refuges of lies, in slavish fear of, but
determined Cainite opposition to, the God of Heaven,
whose supranatural acts in the Deluge and Dispersion
were then recent and overwhelming to the human mind,
rendering atheism in that day perfectly impossible to
even the least reasonable being. Wherefore the most
fargone of the modern Egyptological scholars utterl}"
refused to attend to his, Osburn' s, condemnation of
Marie tte's wonderful stone ; and preferred to go on
trusting themselves entirely to its reputed statements
for the implied profane nature of ''
the Great Pyramid,
ruled over by Isis," thoughno symptoms of either
Isis, or any other, profanity had been found there and ;
though the ancient Great Pyramid is still an existency

in the world, vocal with knowledge and wisdom, while
the later invention of " Iîs " has already faded away
Chap. XXI.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 417
from the Egyptian land like a summer cloud or the

morning dew.
At last, however, one of their own number has
informed upon his fellow Egyptologists and he is the
;
best and ablest man amongst them too; viz., the Ger-
man Brugsch Bey equally on the spot with Mariette
;
Bey, and said to be ''a more learned hieroglyphic

scholar." For thus writes the trusty Dr. Grant from
Cairo, date June 3rd, 1873, "I have been learning
much from Brugsch Bey lately, and he tells me that
Mariette' s stone hears a lie on the face of it —that the
style of sculpture is not very ancient, and that the whole
inscription is simply a legend that has been scratched
upon it at a late date, and that it cannot be quoted as
an authority on any of the points mentioned in it."
So now the Sphinx, with its body pierced through
and through with long iron rods by Colonel Howard-
Vyse, and found to contain nothing ; and its nose
knocked off by a mediaeval Mohammedan dervish to
prevent its both ensnaring his countrymen by idola-
trous beauty, and leading them to inquire too curiously
(as Moses warned the Israelites against their attempt-
ing to do, on entering Canaan),
— " now how did the
people of this land worship their gods ? " and with its
actual size a mere molecule at the very base of the hill,
of whose summit the Great Pyramid is the pure and
unexceptionable crown — need not be referred to again
by any Christian man looking for instruction from the
Rock of Ages alone.
E B
CHAPTER XXII.
THE SHEPHEKD KINGS.
IN the Third Pyramid of Jeezeli —admired by the

sadly Egyptological Baron Bunsen, on account of its
expensive red-granite casing, far above the Great Pyra-

mid and all its intellectual excellencies Colonel —
Howard-Vyse found, not only the genuine sepulchral
sarcophagus, together with parts of the inscribed coffin-
board, but — a portion of a mummy as well.
In that case, of what or of whom was such frag-
ment the ?mummy
Of King Mencheres," insisted every Egyptologist,
''
" for he it was who built the third Pyramid some 60 years
after the Great one had been erected." Whereupon the

remains were transmitted with honour to the British
Museum and the learned Baron, in his " Egypt's Place
;
"
in History," has an eloquent eulogium on the " pious
king whose ancient remains, if removed at last out of
their old mausoleum, are now vastly safer in the distant
isle whose free institutions
of the Queen-ruled empire,
preserve her liberty and prosperity for ever.
But here William Osburn (whom Bunsen never liked)
steps in with the wholesome reminder, that none of the
mummies df the Old Empire have come down to our
age their bodies, fragrant for a while with spices and
:
myrrh, sooner or later returned, dust to dust and a ;
little of such dark matter at the bottom of sarcophagi,

Chap. XXTL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 419
is all that has yet been discovered in any of the tombs

of the earliest period. was reserved, says he, to the
It
over-clever Egyptians of the New Empire, when Thebes
rose above Memphis, to discover the too efficacious method
of embalming with natron —
a method which has enabled
the bodies of that later period to last down to our
times and has thereby put it into the power of fanatic
;
Mohammedans to treat Pharaonic corpses with every

contumely, male and female, old and young, rich and
poor, dragged out of all their decent cerements, to be
exposed in these latter days on the dunghill, or broken
up for fuel.
Wherefore the parts of a body found in pretty tough
preservation by Colonel Yyse in the Third Pyramid,
could not have belonged to either King Mencheres or
any of his subjects or to any genuine Egyptian so
;
early as the fourth dynasty. But presently this further

discovery was made, that the cloth in which the remains
were wrapped up, was not composed of the proverbial
linen of ancient Egypt, but of sheep's wool, — a textile
material which was a religious abomination to all
Pharaonic Egyptians.
Then wrote certain scholars, quickly framing up a
theory to suit the occasion, " Both King Mencheres and
all the other Jeezeh Pyramid builders must have been,
not Egyptians, but of that ancient and most mysterious
class of invaders of, or immigrants into, ancient Egypt,
the Hyksos or Shepherd Kings."
How little is positively known of tliem, may appear
from one modern author, who writes,
« When investigating the early history of the world,
the Hyksos cross our path like a mighty shadow
advancing from native seats to which it baffled the
geography of antiquity to assign a position, covering for
a season the shores of the Mediterranean and the banks
of the Nile with the terror of their arms and the renown
of their conquests, and at length vanishing with a mys-

tery equal to that of their first appearance."
While the learned Dr. Hincks writes, " Later investi-
gations have rather increased than removed my difficul-
ties ; and, as a matter of argument, it would be in-
different to me to sustain, that the, Hyhsos once occupied

Lower Egypt ; or that they were never there at all."
But Dr. Hincks was perhaps more of an Assyrian,
than an Egyptian, scholar and the pure Egyptologists
;
have no doubt whatever about a period of Hyksos' rule

in Egypt just before the time of the Israelites' captivity,
and perhaps including a part of it. They consider,
indeed, that there is still monumentally visible the most
decided separation between the Old and New Empires
of Ancient Egypt, caused altogether by the domination
of those whom they call the " Shepherds;" for they drop
the aggrandizing word of " Kings," as needless, when
talking of those who, if there at all, ruled on the banks
of the Nile with a rod of iron through three successive
dynasties, viz., the 15th, 16th, and 17th; and caused
an almost total blank or perversion for that period in
the architectural history, as well as much modification
in the religion, of all the Lower and Middle country.
Of the precise nature of that change and the origin
of the party bringing it about, William Osburn has some
special ideas, which, withmore space at command, we
might do well to inquire into though now, as the
:
limits of this book are drawing to a close, and as he

agrees with all the other Egyptologists as to what
dynasties such party occupied, viz., the 15th, 16th,
and 17th, —we may rest assured that all men of those
dynasties, whether they were native or foreign shep-
herds, lived far too late in the world's history to have
had any hand in building the Jeezeh Pyramids under
the much earlier fourth dynasty.
Hence the Shepherds that Colonel Yyse alludes to
Chap. XXIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 421
(on the strength of the woollen- wrapt body from the

Third Pyramid), if ever really existing, must have been,
in order to have helped to build the Pyramids, of a
period belonging to the said ve'ry early fourth dynasty ;
and were therefore totally different, in time and fact,

from the later Shepherds so well known to Egyptologists.
That these later, or 15th, 16th, and 17th dynasty.
Shepherds did not build the Jeezeh, or indeed any of
the Egyptian, Pyramids, does not by itself overthrow
the whole theory, or possibility of there having been
an earlier, and quite distinct. Shepherd invasion, or
temporary rule of Hyksos in Lower Egypt, and perhaps
even during the 4 th, or chief Pyramid-building dynasty ;
for pastoral tribes existed in the East from the earliest

times, and were much endued with tendencies to western
emigration. But whether they really did enter Egypt
in force, during the 4th dynasty, must be settled on
direct evidence of its own. Such evidence, indeed, the
worthy Colonel thought he had obtained though now ;
we may see clearly that his reasoning was founded too

much on the piece of flannel, and too little on the
whole of the grand masonried facts of the Gre^t Pyra-
mid and their purity from all idolatry whereupon he ;
soon loses himself in illogical conclusions ; arguing in

a preconceived circle, thus
*'
It has been assumed (in my, Vyse's, opinion satis-
by Bryant, that these mighty Shepherds (his
factorily)
supposed Pyramid builders in the 4th dynasty) were
the descendants of Ham, on account of
expelled,
apostacy and rebellion, from Babel, from Egypt, and
from Palestine and who afterwards, under the name
;
of Cyclopes, Pelasgi, Phcenices, &c., were pursued by

Divine vengeance, and successively driven from every
settled habitation —
from Greece, from Tyre, and from
Carthage, even to the distant regions of America, where
traces of their buildings, and, it has been supposed, of
^22 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part V.
their costume, as represented in Egyptian sculpture, have

been discovered. These tribes seem formerly to have
been living instances of Divine retribution, as the dis-
persed Jews are at present. They appear to have been
at last entirely destroyed but their wanderings and
;
misfortunes have been recorded by the everliving genius

of the two greatest poets in the Greek and Latin lan-
guages and the Pyramids remain, enduring yet silent
;
monuments of the matchless grandeur of this extraor-

dinary people, of the certainty of Divine justice, and of
the truth of Eevelation."
But while it is perfectly impossible that such sinful
men could have been the genuine authors of all the
pure and holy features we have found in the Great
Pyramid, —
or that Hamitic Cainites would have found
ainy difficulty in amalgamating with the Mizraite Egyp-
tians, — it is most satisfactory to know that the mere
piece of woollen cloth found in the Third Pyramid can
be explained in a much easier manner than by going up,
in the teeth of masonried facts, to the primeval antiquit}'
of the world or thus ;
—
" The remains found by Colonel
Yyse were those of a mediaeval Arab, who, having
died at Caliph Al Mamoun's breaking into the Third
Pyramid, was straightway wrapped up in his own bur-
nouse, and thrust down the entrance-passage for his
burial, when the Mohammedan workmen came away and
closed the place up, as it turned out, for 1,000 years.
And if the poor man's bones are so well preserved as to
have allowed of their safe transport to London, it is on
account of the short time they have been sepultured,
compared with anything belonging to the real Fourth
Dynasty and the building of its Pyramids."
Of Primeval Shemite Shepherds.

That simple explanation, therefore, completely settles
the value of the mistaken lumber on the shelves at the
Chap.XXIL] the great pyramid. 423
British Museum ; but leaves us still with a historical

question on our hands, as to whether there were, after
any Hyksos or Shepherd Kings from the East,
all,
descendants too of Shem, rather than Ham (for of

Hamites there were always enough and to spare, keepers
of their own sheep too, in the persons of the Egyptians
themselves), in Egypt during the fourth dynasty ?
Some strangers from the eastern direction were in-
deed continually filtering into Lower Egypt through
the Isthmus of Suez, the natural channel of immigra-
tion in all ages from Asia, and the path by which the
Egyptians themselves had originally come. But it is
our more particular business now to ascertain, if pos-
sible, whether during the period of that particular 4th
dynasty, say from 2300 to 2100 B.C. (or an age pre-
vious to the calling of Abraham), there were any re-
markable eastern men in position of lordly rule, power,
or notoriety in the Egyptian land and whether they
:
either had, in the general estimation of all men, any-

thing to do with the building of the Great Pyramid
or were likely to have been able to furnish any part of
its design, as manifested by modern science; or had an
interest in preserving its religiously pure character, in

the midst of an age and a nation given up to the
worst forms of idolatry.
What then does history say to the point ?
History is scanty enough, every one will allow, for
times before Abraham and though something may be
;
occasionally made out for even those dates in such a

land as Egypt, it is to be gained, even there, only by
a conflict with difficulties. There is actually a dispute,
for instance, between the Egyptologists on one side,
and Alexandrian classics on the other, whether there
was ever a fourth dynasty at all. We must, therefore,
when everything is disputed or disputable, interrogate
either party very closely.
424 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part v.
Egy^tologic Details of Early Kings.
To begin with the Egyptologists; the literary founda-

tions for what they assert, are confined to Manetho
(270 B.C.), or to what has come down to us of his
own writings in fragments of authors SOO or 400 years
later and whose words may be conveniently examined
;
in the volume of " Fragments," by Isaac Preston Cory,

of Caius College, Cambridge (1832 a.d.)
There then, most undoubtedly, a fourth dynasty is
mentioned but it begins with a puzzling statement
; ;
for while the third dynasty is simply said to be com-

posed of so many Memphite kings, and the fifth dynasty
of so many Elephantine kings, this fourth dynasty is
stated to be composed of " eight Memphite kings of a
different race'^
This is a curious statement, and I do not know what
it means ; but the list proceeds as follows for the kings
concerned :
(1) Soris reigned 29 years.

(2) He built tlie largest Pyramid; which
Suphis reigned 63 years.
Herodotus says was constructed by Cheops. He was arrogant towards
the gods, and wrote the sacred book which is regarded by the Egyptians
;
as a work of great importance.

(3) Suphis II. reigned 66 years.
(4) Mencheres 63 years.
(5) Rhatoeses 25 years.
(6) Bicheres 22 years.
(7) Sebercheres 7 years.
(8) Thampthis 9 years.
Altogether 284 years.
This literary foundation, the Egyptologists further

contend that they can confirm in all its main par-
ticulars from the monuments, by finding, even in the
Great Pyramid itself, evidently alluded to by Manetho,
rude original quarry-marks with two royal names which
they interpret Shofo and Noumshofo, and declare to be
the two Suphises mentioned above while they find the
;
further royal name of Mencheres in the third Pyramid,

Chap. XXII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 425
notoriously a later construction than both the Great and

Second Pyramids which Second Pyramid is elsewhere
;
attributed to Suphis II., as the Great one is here to

Suphis I.
But the rest of the sentence attached to the name 6f
the first Suphis is a difficulty which the Egyptologists
cannot altogether master. They can understand, for
instance, easily enough, that he either built the Great
Pyramid, or reigned while it was being built but what
;
was his " arrogance towards the gods ? " and what were
"
the contents of " his sacred book ?
Of all these things the Egyptologists knew nothing
from contemporary monuments although they can
;
adduce abundant proof therefrom, that Mencheres of

the Third Pyramid was an out-and-out idolater of the
Egyptians. That was the " piety " which Baron Bun-
sen praised ;while Osburn, though he condemned
rather than praised, so far allowed what the other
Egyptologists founded upon, that he shows, at much
length. King Mencheres to have been, not indeed the
original inventor and theotechnist of animal and other
gods for his countrymen, —
but the greatest codifier in
all history of those things. He, Mencheres, was the
establisher, too, of a priesthood for those things' con-
tinual service and was an extender of the mythological
;
system into new and mysterious ramifications the very

;
man, in fact, who put Misraite idolatry into that en-

snaring form and artistical condition with Isis, Osiris,
Horus, Typhon, Nepthys, and all the rest of his inven-
tions, in addition to the older Apis, Mnevis, and the
Mendesian goat, that it became the grand national and
lasting system of his country, —
monopolising the souls
of Egyptians for two thousand years, and even
all
then dying hard.

Mencheres was, in point of fact, in and for the land
of the Nile, just what the too eloquent author, of
" Juventus Mundi," with such longing admiration

amounting almost to ill-concealed envy, describes
Homer to have been for the Greeks in the same line
— viz., in " theotechny." Worldly success in which
ethereal art or elevated occupation, as it is according to
Aim, but much more probably an abomination before
God, — the English Prime Minister (unhappily not
seeing it more noble,
in that light) declares to be a far
more satisfying pinnacle for human ambition, than any
amount of excellence whatever either in poetry or
prose, civil administration, or even military glory.
But of Shofo, the hieroglyphists can pick up but
little, if anything, positively of that kind of informa-
tion. The worship, indeed, of bulls and goats had
been already set up in Egypt during the previous
dynasty, so that he found it in force on succeeding to
the throne ; and
perhaps went on during his reign
it
until such time as he is reported on one hand to have

become " arrogant towards the gods," and on the other
to have closed their temples and stopped their public
worship, as we shall now see detailed on turning to the
Classic authorities.
Classic Names for Early Egyptian Kings.

Amongst all these authors, indeed i.e., men who
either were Greeks or followed the Greeks and did not
—
know Egyptian whether with Herodotus in 445 B.C.,
Eratosthenes 236 B.C., Diodorus Siculus 60 B.C., and
Strabo B.C., there is no fourth dynasty at all nor, for :
that matter, any allusion to any dynasty or arrange-

ment by dynasties whatever. "While the chronological
order of the kings by name, is at one point altogether
dislocated from its sequence in the Manethoan dynasties
the kings' names of the very early fourth dynasty of
the Egyptologists, being, with the classics, placed after
Chap. XXIL] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 427
those which are found in the comparatively late nine-

teenth dynasty of the same Egyptologists.
Sir Gardner Wilkinson * explains this terrible ana-
chronism for Herodotus (and if for him, for all his
copying fellow-countrymen and successors at the same
time), by suggesting that he (Herodotus) was furnished
by the Egyptian priests with two separate lists of kings'
names ; and as they read out to him (through his
interpreter, he not understanding Egyptian) the later
one first (and he put them all down in faith as he heard
them in one long row), he, of course, got the old Mem-
phite sovereigns coming in after the more modern
Thebans. The began with the Theban kings
priests
of the 19 th dynasty, because they were fresh in their
memory and they remembered well the glorious times
;
of their priestly order under those reigns, whereof,

too, they told the innocent Halicarnassian a variety
of pleasant, gossiping tales and only when that stock
;
was ended, did they touch, very unwillingly, on the

Memphite kings, chiefly of the fourth dynasty, and the
hard times the priests had had under tkeifn.
Some such explanation, too, of the dislocated chro-
nology of the Greek history of Egypt, must apparently
be the true one for the whole philosophy of archi-
;
tecture, as elaborated on ten thousand examples by

James Fergusson, makes it as impossible historically
and mechanically for the Pyramids of Lower Egypt
to have followed the palace-temples and sculpture of
Upper Egypt, — and socially it is utterly
as historically
impossible, that after Thebeshad once risen to supreme
power in Egypt, the rulers there would have allowed by
far the chief work of their age to be executed on the
borders of their kingdom in the " provinces," or near
the then ancient, decaying and conquered city of
* See note to p. 199 of Bawlinson's " Herodotus," vol. ii.

Memphis. As well might we expect the British Parlia-

ment to give its largest grants for the year to Edinburgh,
instead of London ; and men will have to wait until
the whole river of history passes by, and runs itself
absolutely dry, before such a phenomenon as
we see
that although too Scotland was never fairly conquered.
;
Setting aside, then, agreeably with Sir Gardner Wil-

kinson and all the Egyptologists, this one large fault or
mistaken order of a group of the Egyptian kings in
—
Greek and classic authors, from Herodotus in 445
B.C. to the Rev. Mr. Galloway and Mr. Samuel Sharpe,
in 1869 A.D., —
as simply and altogether a book-mistake
of theirs, we shall find in the smaller details, subsequent
to the dislocation, much agreement. As, for instance,
in the names of the three successive kings of the three
chief and successive Pyramids of Jeezeh which kings' ;
names are always given in their proper, or, both monu-

mental, hieroglyphic, and Manethoan sequence to each
other though the scholars have certainly agreed to
;
accept a remarkable variety of names as meaning the

same word or man as thus ;
Names of the Builders op the three largest Pyramids op Jeezeh

according to various authorities.
Authorities.
Chap. XXII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 429
Tlie, Lives of the Kings.
But what, after all, is there in a name ? It is the

character of each individual king of many names, which
we require and especially if there be anything in it,
;
which may indicate whether that royal personage could

have built the Great Pyramid.
There the conversational style of Herodotus (the
oldest existing author in the world,it is said, next to
Moses), dipping deep into the feelings of men, will

serve us better than the bald rigidity of hieroglyphic
inscriptions ; though, as Herodotus gathered up every-
thing without siftingit, and as between the purposed
what the Egyptian priests often related to

falsities of
him, in a language which he did not understand and
his interpreters did not faithfully translate to him, — it
is little more than the involuntary evidence, under cross-

examination, that can be trusted. Here, however, as a
beginning, are his own simple statements.
(124) "Cheops," according to the Egyptian priests,* "on ascending

the throne, plunged into all manner of wickedness. He closed the
temples, and forbade the Egyptians to offer sacrifice, conipelling them
instead to labour one and all in his service ; viz., in building the Great
Pyramid."
(128) " Cheops reigned fifty years and was succeeded by his brother
;
Chephren, who imitated the conduct of his predecessor, built a pyramid

—
but smaller than his brother's and reigned fifty-six years. Thus, during
106 years the temples were shut and never opened."
(129) "After Chephren, Mycerinus, son of Cheops, ascended the
throne. He reopened the temples, and allowed the people to resume the
practice of sacrifice. He, too, left a pyramid, but much inferior in size to
"
his father's. It is built, for half of its height, of the stone of Ethiopia
;
i.e., expensive red granite.
(136) "After Mycerinus, Asychis ascended the throne. He built the

eastern gateway of the Temple of Vulcan (Phtha); and being desirous of
eclipsing all his predecessors on the throne, left as a monument of hia
reign a pyramid of brick."
Now here we have four successive kings, each of

whom erected a Pyramid and the last of them entered
;
* Ch. 124, p. 199, of Rawlinson's Translation of Herodotus, vol. ii.
See also a very salutary note, No. 9, on p. 205, by Sir G. Wilkinson.

into the work no less enthusiastically than the first.
Therefore it not have been Pyramid-building

could
in itself, or as known to, and understood by, the natives,
which had the discriminating effect of causing the two
last kings to be approved, and the two first to be hated,
by all Egyptians to the terrible and intense degree de-
scribed by successive classic authors. This difference of
estimation must have risen from some difference of pro-
ceeding in either pair of kings and such an opposite ;
manner is religiously found in this circumstance, that

the two first kings closed the temples, and stopped the
worship of the bulls, cats, goats, beetles, and other
Egyptian gods while the two last kings re-opened
;
those temples, enlarged them, beautified them, and

re-established the soul-degrading theotechnic inventions
of Egypt in greater splendour than ever: though, too,
they were the very idols which the Lord declares " He
will destroy, and cause their images to cease out of
Noph."
Tlie Right Man at last.
But there is more than this tobe gathered from the

classic records ; for there comes up ampngst them a
something suggestive, even to the extent of a ray of
upon that very question which, even to
positive light,
Diodorus Siculus, was so much more important than
who were the kings who ordered, viz., who were the
architects who designed or built, the Pyramids for ;
Herodotus further states :
**
(128) The Egyptians so detest the memory of these (the two first) kinpfs
(Cheops and Chephren), that they do not much like even to mention their
names. Hence, they commonly call the Pyramids (the Great and the
Second) after Philition (or Philitis), a shepherd who at that time fed his
flocks ahout the place."
Seldom has a more important piece of truth been

unintentionally issued in a few words. Sir Gardner
Chap. XXIL] THE GREA T PYRAMID. 43
Wilkinson, in his note to that passage,* allows at once

the Hyksos, or Shepherd-princely, character and stand-
ing of a stranger who could be so distinguished in con-
nection with the greatest of the monuments of Egypt
and only anxious to guard his readers as to the par-
is
ticular personage alluded to, having really lived in the

early fourth dynasty, and not having been one of those
later, better known, but totally different individuals who
figured as the Shepherd Kings in the 15 th, 16 th, and
17th dynasties. While Mr. Kawlinson, in another note
on the same page, seems equally ready to allow, not —
only that Philitis was a Shepherd prince from Palestine,
—
and perhaps of Philistine descent, but so powerful and
domineering, that it may be traditions of Ms oppressions
in that earlier age, which mixed up afterwards in the
minds of later Egyptians with the evils inflicted on
their country by the subsequent shepherds of the better-
known and knt so much fear to their
dynasties ;
religious hate of " Shepherd " times and that name.

If this theory of Mr. Kawlinson's be correct, we may
learn something further of the Great Pyramid's fourth
dynasty Shepherd —
Prince Philitis —
by attending to
what Manetho has written of the subsequent Shepherds
and especially by eliminating therefrom, certain features
which cannot by any possibility be true of those men
such as they were in that later day. For thus wrote
the Sebennyte priest :t
" We had formerly a king whose name was Timeus.
In his time it came to pass, I know not how, that God
was displeased with us and there came up from the
:
East, in a strange manner, men of an ignoble race, who

had the confidence to invade our country, and easily
subdued it by their power without a battle."
This, it will be observed, is a very peculiar phrase
* P. 207, vol.
ii., of Rawlinson's "Herodotus."
t Cory's "Fragments," p. 169.

and lends much colour to the suggestion that Philitis

was enabled to exert a certain amount of control over
King Shofo and his Egyptian people, not by the vulgar
method of military conquest, but by some supernatural
influence over their minds.
*'
All this invading nation," Manetho goes on to say,
" was styled Hycsos, that is, Shepherd Kings for the ;
first syllable, Hyc, in the sacred dialect denotes a king
and Sos signifies a shepherd, but this only according to

the vulgar tongue and of these is compounded the
;
term Hycsos some

: say they were Arabians."
Yet if they were Arabians, why did they not return
to Arabia, when they afterwards, " to the number of not
less than 240,000, quitted Egypt by capitulation, with
all their families and effects?" And went where to? —
" To Judsea, and built there," says Manetho, " a city of
sufficient size to contain this multitude of men, and

named it Jerusalem." *
Now here is most important tale, if anything
surely a
written in books by ancient authors is worthy of any
modern attention. For, making all due allowance for
some of the references, and much of the expressed hate
and abuse being due to the more modern and largely
native t Egyptian shepherds of the 15 th to the 17th
dynasties (and who, according to W. Osburn, were chiefly
conquered and oppressed within the bounds of Lower
Egypt by invasions of Thebans and fanatic Ethiopians),
we have as much as testifies to the earlier and truer
Shepherd Prince Philitis, after having long controlled
King Shofo during the very time that the Great
—
Pyramid was building, to that Prince Philitis, I say,
then leaving the country with a high hand, or by
special agreement, with all his people and flocks, pro-
ceeding to Judaea, and building there a city which he
—
* Cory's "Fragments," p. 173.
t According to William Osburn iu his '*
Monumental History."
Chap. XXn.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 433
named Jerusalem and which must have at once taken

;
a high standingamong the primeval cities of the earth,

if he made it large enough to contain not less than
240,000 persons.
Of the Early Life of Melchizedek
Now the man who did that, after assisting at the

foundation of the Great P3^ramid in 2170 B.C., must
have been a contemporary nearly of, but rather older
than, the Patriarch Abraham, according to the best
Biblical chronology. Or he must have been, as to age,
standing, country, and even title, very nearly such a
one asthat grandly mysterious kingly character to
whom even Abraham offered the tenth of the spoils,
viz., Melchizedek further called King of Salem, which
;
some consider to have been Jeru-salem.

The Bible does not, indeed, directly mention Mel-
chizedek' s ever having been sent into Egypt on any
special mission the grandest of missions, if then to
;
erect, or procure the erection of, a prophetical monu-

ment which was only to be understood in the latter
days of the world but was destined then to prove the
;
Inspiration origin and Messianic character of its design

to both religious and irreligious. But the Bible does
not describe anything of the earlier life of Melchizedek ;
though it has allusions elsewhere which may possibly

indicate a grand occasion in the life of one, concern-
ing whom so very little is said, though by whom so
much must have been done, in the course of his long,
heaven-approved, and gloriously- terminating career.
In Deuteronomy, ch. ii., for instance, there appears
something of the kind when Moses,* encouraging the
;
Israelites to be of good heart in their march, under

Divine favour, out of Egypt into Palestine, —
mentions
two other and long preceding occasions on which God
F F
liad shown similar favour to other peoples, and they

were established successfully in consequence.
First, " the children of Esau ;
" and afterwards, ''
the
Caphtorims which came forth out of Caphtor." Or, as
alluded to again, long after the times of the Exodus (in
Amos ix. "
have not I (the Lord) brought up Israel
7),
out of Egypt and the Philistines from Caphtor ?"
This Caphtor alluded to on both occasions, is generally
considered to mean Egypt, the Pyramid region, too, of
Lower Egypt ; and although in the one instance, the
people are spoken of as Caphtorim, that may imply
not necessarily native Egyptians, but men who had
been sojourning in that country for a season even as ;
the testimony of Herodotus infers that Philitis (a name

looked on by some as implying a Philistian descent or
country), with his flocks and herdsmen (appropriately
then called Philistines in Caphtor), had been doing
during all the thirty years occupied in the preparations
for, and then the building up of, the Great Pyramid.
In short, the Biblical evidence touching this mighty

and most unique monument of sacred and prophetic
purport, is deserving of more intimate and peculiar
study than we have yet bestowed upon it.
Chap. XXIII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 4*35
CHAPTER XXIII.
«
SUPERIOR TESTIMONY.
Biblical Views of Metrology in General.
TTIEWING the Great Pyramid first of all as a monu-

* ment of metrology alone, that subject has been
shown from Scripture- by many writers (as Michaelis, in
Germany Paucton, in France
; and more recently,
;
John Taylor, in England) to have been deemed worthy

of Divine attention, or providence, for the good of
man such instructions as the following having been
;
issued through the approved medium of inspired men

honoured with the commands of Revelation, viz. :
" Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight,

or in measure.
"Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye
have I am the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of
:
Egypt.
"Therefore shall ye observe all my statutes, and all my judgments, and
do them I am the Lord." Leviticus xix. 35 37.
: —
" But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just mea-
sure shalt thou have that thy days maybe lengthened in the land which
:
the Lord thy God giveth thee." Deuteronomy xxv. 15.

" A false balance is abomination to the Lord but a just weight is his
:
delight." Proverbs xi. L

" A just weight and balance are the Lord's all the weights of the bag
:
are his work." Proverbs xvi. IL

"Thus saith the Lord God; Let it suffice jou, princes of Israel:
remove violence and spoil, and execute judgment and justice, take away
your exactions from my people, saith the Lord God.
" Ye shall have just balances, and a just ephah, and a just bath.
" The ephah and the bath shall be of one measure, that the bath may
contain the tenth part of an homer, and the ephah the tenth part of an
homer: the measure thereof shall be after the homer." Ezekiel xlv.
9—11.
This was a department of the Holy Service which

King David had appointed, in his days, a portion of the
Levites to attend to ;* and his son Solomon established
the grand standards of measure in the noblest propor-
tions :t while Moses had been, in his still earlier day,
exceedingly particular in all his metrological institutions,
and impressive in his method of carrying them out;]]; his
chief standard measures being, as already shown, the
earth and heaven founded standards of the Great Pyra-
mid itself if they were not also those which had been
;
elaborated (according to Josephus) by Seth and his

descendants in opposition to the bad inventions of Cain,
and under the direct approval of the Almighty.
With the structure of the Pyramid building, indeed,
in its main design and ultimate purposes (though never
so distinctly or categorically alluded to in Scripture, as

thereby to give men any excuse for turning aside to it,
like a broken bow, any kind of spiritual worship), the

for
inspired writers of both the Old and New Testaments
have evinced a very considerable acquaintance. And
not dry knowledge only; for those men, "gifted with
thoughts above their thoughts," have shown an amount
of feeling, only to be explained by a holy consciousness
of the part which the monument is one day to serve, in
manifesting forth in modes adapted to these and the
approaching times, the original and ineffable inspiration
of Scripture, — as well as the practical reasons for ex-
pecting the return of our Lord to an undoubted personal
reign for a miraculous season over the entire earth.
* 1 Chronicles xxiii. 29.

t Kings vii. 29 and 2 Chronicles iv. 5.
1 \
X See John David Michaelis, of Gottingen, " On the Plans which

Moses took for the Regulation of Weights and Measures " at pp. 454
;
470 of vol. ii. of his ''Hehrew Weights and Measures." See also my
"Life and Work," pp. 498—507 of vol. iii.
Chap. XXIIL] THE GREA T PYRAMID, 437
Old Testament Witnesses to the Great Pyramid.
So were the mechanical steps for the founda-

well, too,
tion of the Great Pyramid understood (these steps being
the heavy preliminary works of preparation and subter-
ranean masonry described by Herodotus as having
characterised the Great Pyramid, and declared by Lepsius
to have been eschewed in every other pyramid erected
altogether by, and for, Cainite Egyptian idolaters), so —
well, I say, were these features understood by the in-
spired writers, that the mysterious things of Nature,
visible to, but not easily apprehended by, men in the
early ages, were occasionally described in terms of
these more exact features of the Great Pyramid.
Thus, when we read in Job xxxviii., marginally cor-
rected, that the Lord answered the patriarch out of the
whirlwind, demanding with power,
""Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth ? declare,
if thou knowest understanding.
'*
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest ? or who hath
stretched the line upon it ?
" Whereupon are the sockets thereof made to sink ? or who laid the
corner- stone thereof
"When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God
shouted for joy ?"
— it is John Taylor first pointed

quite plain (since at least
it out; for to him we owe almost entirely this branch of
the subject) that if the creation of the earth is here
alluded to, it is described under a type of something
else, and not was created or both as
as the earth .really ;
we know it by modem and as it was

science to be,
described in chap. xxvi. of the same book of Job, in the
following words :
" He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the
earth upon nothing."
The earliest of the first quoted descriptions might

apply to the building of any ordinary house but as ;
successive practical features are enumerated, the build-

ing of a stone pyramid by careful measure, and in the
Promethean, and forethought, manner of the Great
Pyramid, on a previously prepared platform of rock, is
the only known work that will fully correspond.

The stretching of the line wpon
it, is more applicable
to the inclined surface of a pyramid with an angle to

the horizon of 51° 51', than to the vertical walls of any
ordinary house and; —
after the pointed and most
apposite question, " Canst thou bind the sweet influ-
ence of Pleiades?"
— — the further Divine interrogation,
"Knowest thou the ordinances of the heavens ?
Canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?"
has been happily explained very lately by the Rev.
F. R. A. Glover. For he shows it to be, the Great
Pyramid's chronological use of the grand celestial cycle
of the precession of the equinoxes, taken in connection
with a particular polar distance and meridian transit
of the circumpolar star a Draconis the memorial of
;
which stellar position, "dominant in the earth," is
exhibited by the lower portion of the entrance-passage

of the Great Pyramid, set backwards and downwards
into, and deep, deep into, the solid rock of the hill, in
precisely such a direction as to suit the critical position
of that star under the influence of precession at the
very epoch of the Pyramid's foundation.
But what was meant by " the sockets thereof being
made to sink," —
might have been uncertain, had it not
been for the researches of the French savants at the
Great Pyramid in 1800; for the}^ described, without
reference to this sentence, the remarkable sockets which
had been formed in the previously levelled area of rock
on which this Pyramid stands and (with the assistance
;
of the more modern investigations in 1865) the manner

in which each of the lower four corner-stones of the
Pyramid were fitted into these prepared hollows in the
Chap.XXIIL] the great pyramid. 439
rock, — causing them to become at once the fiducial

points from which all measurers have, ever since then,
stretched their measuring-lines on the building.
Four of the five corner-stones of the Pyramid are thus
indicated as of Scriptural notice fifth, which
; while the
is an entirely diverse character and greater
in fact of
importance, being not one of the foundations, but the
topmost portion of the whole building, is alluded to
in Job separately more gloriously and even as being
; ;
the finishing and crowning portion of the whole in-

tended work. For when that topmost corner-stone,
emphatically called " the corner-stone," was finally
placed, —
it is said that the act was greeted by " the
morning stars singing together, and all the sons of God

shouting for joy."
The Biblical interpretation of the passages here
alluded to is, of course, "the faithful and the true
converts;" "as many Spirit of God,
as are led by the
they are the sons of God." And
such who were all
present at the time, rejoiced in seeing the completion of

the Great Pyramid with a joy far exceeding what the
erection of any ordinary building, however palatial,
might have been expected to give them for their cry, ;
when the head-stone of this one " great mountain was

brought out with shoutings," took the exquisite form of
" Grace, grace unto it !"* And if they so cried, and it
is so reported in the Holy Bible, was it not because
they recognised that that stone had been appointed by

Divine wisdom, and in the mystery of God's primeval
proceedings towards man, to recall some essential ideas
connected with the one central point about which all
Scripture revolves viz., the Son of God, His incarnation
;
and sacrifice for the salvation of man. But of this we

shall be instructed more clearly in the New Testament.
* Zech. iv. 7.
4io OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part V.
lêw Testament Allusions to the Great Pyramid.
From a practical worker like St. Paul, we have even

a most methodical illustration, in the use which he
makes of certain constructive differences between the
four lower corner-stones, and the single corner-stone
above ; constructive differences which, if applicable to
any other building at all, are only fully applicable to
the wonderful Great Pyramid for his words are;
" Ye are fellow-citizens of the saints, and of the

household of God and are built upon the foundation
;
of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being

the chief corner-stone, in whom the whole building, fitly
framed together, groweth unto an holy temple in the
Lordr^
This fitly framing of the whole building as it grows
from a broad base upwards into one corner-stone above,
and which is called the chief, the upper, corner-stone,
was shown by John Taylor to be an unmistakeable allu-
sion to the Great Pyramid and this same noble figura-
;
tive employment of that particular topmost stone, viz.,

its representation of the Messiah, and His crowning the
scheme of the redemption of man, is one frequently —

employed in Holy Scripture as in Psalm cxviii. 2 2
;
;
in the Gospels, and the Epistles.t The stone is there

alluded not only as the chief corner-stone, " elect
to,
and precious," made " the head of the corner " (which
is only perfectly and pre-eminently true of the topmost
angle of a pyramid), but as having been for a long time

*'
disallowed by the builders," and existing only as " a
stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to them."|
* Ephes. ii. 19. See also J. Taj^lor's " Great Pyramid," pp. 208—243.
t Matt. xxi. 42 Mark xii. 10 Luke xx. 17 Acts iv. 11 1 Peter ii. 4.
; ; ; ;
X In the important theological work by the Rev. John Harrison, D.D.,

"Whose are the Fathers," there is, at pp. 163—172, a very able repre-
sentation of the special exigences of mere ecclesiasticism in the narrow,
Chap. XXIII.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 441
*
The simile is easily and perfectly applicable to our
Saviour's appearance on earth yet evidently, from the
;
very principle of all such figurative allusions, a some-

thing bearing on the nature of the figure made use of,
must, Mr. Taylor urged, have been existing on the earth
before or it would never have been employed.
;
Now we know that the Great Pyramid did stand on

its desert hill before any of the inspired authors wrote;
and also, that they seem to have been spiritually con-
versant with many principles of its construction, although
they were not visitors to the land of Egypt and it is ;
they who allude to some notorious objections by the

builders against the head corner-stone, while their work
was in progress.
What were these ?
The stones required for building the Great Pyramid

from the quarry-marks and instructions
Avere evidently,
to the masons still Legible upon some of them, prepared
at the quarries according to the architect's orders a long
time beforehand. For the vast majority, too, of stones,
nothing but one unvarying figure, rather flattish and
chiefiy rectangular, was required. But amongst them,
and different therefrom, one was ordered which did not
chime in with any of the Egyptian building notions,
certainly not of their temples, tombs, or palaces. For,
in place of being cubic, or with nearly parallel sides and
rectangular comers, this single stone was all acutely
angled, all sharp points so that turn it over on any
;
side as it lay on the ground, one sharp corner was

always sticking up in the air as, too, could not but be
;
the case when the stone was a sort of model pyramid
albeit learned, view which ecclesiastics take of all those texts, and all this
long line of symhology founded in all architecture and all history. For the
one point to and tor which everything else is there made to exist, is, the
phrase used hy our Lord to Peter (Matt. xvi. 18) ; and what advantage
the Roman Catholic Church has, or has not, though it is denied by Pro-
testants that it has any, over other Christian churches, in consequence of it.
in itself, with five sides, five corners, and sixteen distinct

angles.'"''
Such a stone was of course " a stone of stumbling

and a rock of offence"! to builders whose heads did
not understand, and hearts did not appreciate, the work
they were engaged upon. It was to them " the terrible
;
crystal " + the pointed stone " on which whosoever
shall fall, shall be broken;" and so huge a stone as a
coping for the vast structure of the whole Great
Pyramid, that "on whomsoever it shall fall, it will
grind him to powder." §
Yet when once this unique, five-cornered, and many-
angled stone was raised up to its intended place on the
summit of the Great Pyramid, the propriety of its
figure must have appeared evident to every impartial
beholder though the Egyptian workmen, as may be
;
gathered from Herodotus, forcibly prevented from

breaking out into open opposition, yet went on con-
cealing sinful hatred in their hearts and did after ; —
the deaths of Cheops and Chephren, and after the
Shepherd-Prince Philitis had left the country return —
with renewed vehemence to their bestial idolatry under
Mencheres, "like dogs to their vomit or the sow that
was washed to her wallowing in the mire." II
For such determined resisters of grace was surely

prepared, in their very midst, that type of the bottom-
less pit, the subterranean chamber in the Great Pyramid,
yawning to receive them :
" For they are all delivered unto death, to the nether parts of the
earth, in the midst of the children of men, with them that go down to the
pit.'-'
"This is Pharaoh and all his multitude, saith the Lord God."
Ezek. xxxi. 14 and 18.
But again, and now for the instruction of back-

.
sliding Israel, this prophetic and historic monument

* John Taylor's "Great Pyramid," pp. 262—275.
Chap.XXIIL] the great pyramid, 443
which, like Melchizedek, had no predecessor, was

without architectural parentage or descent, and yet
took rank at once as the greatest of all architecture up
to the present time, —
this more than historic monu-
ment, I say, seems to speak to us in the words of the
only wise Architect :
"I have declared the former things from the beginning; and they
went forth out of my mouth, and I shewed them / did them suddenly
;
and they came to pass."

" I have even from the beginning declared it to thee before it came to
;
pass I shewed it to thee lest thou shouldest say, Mine idol hath done
;
them, and my graven image and my molten image, hath commanded

—
them." Isa. xlviii. 3 and 5.
Never, then, was there any building so perfect as the

Great Pyramid in fulfilling both the earliest words of
the Lord given by Inspiration, and also the New Testa-
ment types of the Messiah. And if the Great Pyramid
is not mentioned in so clear a manner in the New
Testament, that all men may instantly see it, whether
by name, or figure, that may arise from — as circum-
stances still to be related will indicate — its being con-
nected with the Second and future, rather than with
Coming of Christ, which the
that First and past. New
Testament was mainly to chronicle and expound.
CHAPTEH XXIV.
PREPARATIONS FOR UNIVERSAL METROLOGY.
THOUGH everything else may fail to convince some

minds that our nation born to noblest heritages;
is
that the Biblical history of mankind (no matter what

protoplasm philosophers on one side, and believers in
German linguistic theories on the other, may choose to
aver) is a living and material reality and that, too, not;
only for what has already come to pass in history

touching the favoured family of the Hebrews, but also
for the working out of the prophecies still remaining to
be accomplished respecting the two opposed, and distinc-
tive, branches of that people; viz., the Israelites of the
captivity of the Samarian Kingdom of Israel on the
one hand, and the Jews of the destruction of, and dis-
persion from, Jerusalem under Titus, on the other ;
though everything else, I add, may fail to convince

some minds, that our nation may reasonably consider
itself to a large extent descended from the former
(though they were lost to the view of mankind 2,500
years ago), and owes its present unexampled prosperity
and power to the special favour of God, far above
its own intrinsic deserts (and should bow in humility
and adoration accordingly), — the most convincing

proof, I say, of these things to some minds may
be, — to note certain recent episodes of our national
history ; and to mark what disasters might well have
i
Chap. XXIV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 445
befallen us according to the ruling of our statesmen for

the time being, whether on one side of politics or the
other, —yet how the nation was preserved,
strengthened, notwithstanding.
and even
Shall our public ministers then continue in their

erring courses in order that the nation may abundantly
prosper ? —
God forbid that were to tempt God. And
;
though the whole science of statesmanship may be far

too mysteriously deep and difficult for any one man to
presume to point out to another where the whole duty
of a Prime Minister lies, —
yet there is one rather neg-
lected department of that officer's duty, wherein the
very nature of the case allows of clear and simple
mathematical views, capable of all men's understanding,
being introduced and this subject is the Great Pyra-
;
mid's special one of metrology : a national as well as

sacred matter too, though not yet studied from that
side of the question by any British minister.
A worthy science, indeed, long
ill treated and despised
men, is metrology and yet there cannot

of almost all ;
be the shadow of a doubt, that we are now on the eve

of movements of the whole human race in connection
with it all educated communities beginning now to
;
acknowledge it to be a marvellous power with germs of

political influence of the highest order; specially adapted,
too, for the working out of some of the grandest
developments of the future. Every nation until now
has had its own hereditary system of weights and
measures curiously intertwined no doubt with those
;
of other nations in their distant primeval origins, vul-

garized perhaps and even largely debased in times of
mediaeval darkness, as well as pestiferously meddled
wdth and complicated by the doctrinaires of new-born
—
modern and o'ervaulting schools, but still there was
hitherto something more or less national to every nation
in its metrology, as 'in its language; and serving the
446 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pakt V.
same purposes as tlie diversity of tongues in keeping

up the heaven-appointed institution of nations; the —
chief characteristic of all mankind from the days of the
dispersion unknown
; before that event, but never for
one moment ceasing since then. What, therefore, is
likely to be the result of man seeking in these days,

by mean of his own devices, to undermine that institu-
tion of nations, and even endeavouring to quench it off
the face of God's earth ?
Whatever the result, the action to produce it has

already begun and the first weapon ordained to be
;
used, and the first breach to be made in the barriers of

national distinctions, is that of weights and measures.
So that, without probably having distinctly contem-
plated the issue, yet most of the existing civilized
nations have for years past been tending, not to go
all men back to the old, old state
forward, but to bring
they were in when they attempted to build the Tower
of Babel and from which nothing drove them then,
;
but a supra-natural manifestation of the power of God.
Progress of the Communistic French Metre.
Several centuries ago, and even less, there were nearly

1
a hundred varieties of linear standards in use through
Europe, but one of them after another has latterly
dropped out of view, until it was reported at the
French Exposition of 1867, that only thirteen could
then be discovered and since that epoch, all save
;
three or four of them, are said to have practically
n perished, and the metre to be gaining adherents from

even their votarigs, every day.*
" There 'SaF^-therefore," says the pro-French metric
President Barnard, ''been large progress made toward
* ** The Metrical System," by President Barnard, Columbia College,

U.S., 1872.
uniformity, and the most important steps, and the most

significant steps, are those
our own century !" — "No which
man
have been taken
within
not totally regardless of
the history of the past, and not absolutely blind to what
is taking place under his own eye in the present, can
possibly pretend to believe that the world is to be for

ever without a uniform system of weights and measures ;
we cannot suppose that the progress already indicated is
going to be arrested at the point at which it has now

—
reached " " Of the two systems, therefore, just now
!
indicated as the systems between which the world must

choose, unless in regard to this matter it shall hence-
forth stand still for ever, —one or the other must
sooner or later prevail !
!
" And he considers that of
these two, the British yard and the French metre, the
latter is triumph
certain to in the end.
This result has by no means come about altogether
spontaneously, or through unseen and only natural
influences the mind of man has had much to do with
;
it, and it has been the one polar point to which French
ambition has alone been steady and true during the

last eighty years always working for it whether
;
sleeping or waking whether in war or peace, always

:
endeavouring to throw the net of her metrical system

of weights and measures over other nations as well as
her own people and though not without some Im-
;
perial ambition to chain many conquered nations to the

chariot wheels of France, yet with the far deeper Com-
munistic feeling of converting all the nations of the
earth into one great people, speaking one language and
using but one weight and one measure, and that of
human, as directly opposed to Divine, origination.
France had been consistent in her own case she ;
had begun, at her first Revolution, by slaughtering off

allthe accessible individuals of her reigning family ;
who, as such, were the very type and symbol to the

French people of their being a nation, one amongst

many nations or of their living under that post-Babel
;
institution. Having then, at that dreadful close of the

last century, killed off, as far as she then could, all her
royal family, her priests also, and openly abrogated
belief in the God of Scripture, she (France) could, at
that time, of all nations consistently, and with show
of demonstrable reason, become the champion of the
metric, or anti-nation-existence metrological system ; a
system since then everywhere secretly adopted by the
Socialists, Internationalists, Communists in all countries
and, strange to say, by certain scientific men also, in
some cases claiming, in others scorning, to be reputed

Christians.
The task of spreading this nationally suicidal scheme
over all the nations of the world, might seem at first
quite Quixotic and would be, but for schemes and

;
forces in the destiny of man, which man knows little or

nothing about, until they have accomplished their ends
and left him to rue their effects. So that it is owing
at least as much to those unseen influences as to the
direct action of any visible Frenchman, that the French
metric system has been going forward during the last
few years of history at a continually accelerated rate ;
and that one country after another has been persuaded

to adopt it, until suddenly it has been found, to our
exceeding astonishment and practical isolation, that
almost every nation in Europe, and many peoples in
Asia, Africa, and America, have already been converted.
France herself, strango to say, has not profited by
the system either in war or peace. In war she has been
lately defeated with greater overthrows than even the
Persian empire of old and the fighting faculty has
;
abandoned her soldiers almost as completely as it did the

Babylonians towards the calamitous end of their once
powerful independence, or the grandsons of the soldiers
Chap. XXIV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 449
of Alexander the Great, when the Romans slaughtered

them in battle with the utmost ease ; while in peace,
France's commercial transactions, though continually
being **
re-organized " on metrical science, remain far
below those of Great Britain. Yet still she (France) calls
upon all and so many of these nations answer her
nations,
call with delight, and madly encourage each other, to
clothe themselves with this latter-day invention of hers ;
which, if successful, must, in so far as it goes, tend to

decrease the nationality, if not to hasten on the final
disappearance, of every nation adopting it.
Only three years ago there was published by a

committee of Columbia College, United States, an excel-
lent little book entitled the " Metric System." Drawn
up chiefly by their Professor of the higher mathe-
matics (Charles Davies), and approved by those then in
power, —
this work demonstrated unsparingly the artifi-
cial character of the French metrical system, the innu-
merable patches which it required in practice to make
it hold water at all, the errors of its science, its inap-
plicability to the ordinary affairs of the mass of human

kind and concluded with reprinting the celebrated
;
report on weights and measures by John Quincey

Adams which report, after indulging in the utmost
:
oratorical vehemence for saying whatever could be said

as a partisan for either side of the question successively,
concludes with recommending all good United States
men have as little as possible to do with the French

to
standards but to feel hopefully confident that the in-
;
evitable development of the world's history would,

sooner or later, bring up some far better system for the
future happiness and prosperity of mankind.
But three short years have so accelerated the growth
of French metric influence, or the predestined metro-
logical temptation and trial of the whole world, that all —
the parties to that first book upon thfe Metre seem now to
G G
450 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Pai.t V.
have vanished out of existence and a new work, with

;
the same title but totally opposite principles, was

produced last year, to order of new governors, by the new
President (Barnard) of the same college. An enormous
issue of this last book is now being thrown off for dis-
tribution gratuitously far and wide, and (as our extracts
from it have already indicated) it is ecstatically in favour
of the French metric system being adopted by all
Americans with the utmost possible speed. And when
that is brought about, the author declares that Britain,
Russia, and the Scandinavian countries will be the only
known dissentients among educated peoples.
Scandinavia, however, it is asserted, has already been
exhibiting some leanings towards the metric system
Russia is in the hands of her German officials, who are
all now metric men, both at home and abroad and
;
Britain herself, who has hitherto successfully resisted

private Bills in the House of Commons in favour of
French metricalism, is told at last that there shall be a
Government Bill next year. If that be carried, Russia
and Scandinavia are expected immediately to yield and ;
all the nations of the world will then have .passed through
the great French mill, whose whirling stones will never

cease to grind, until, excepting only those sealed by
God, " it has caused all, both small and great, rich and
poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right
hand or in their foreheads and that no man might buy
;
or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the

beast, or the number of his name." (Rev. xiii. 16, 17.)
Preparations made hy the British Government.
Meanwhile, what have the ministers of Great Britain

been doing either to fend off this dire calamity, or to
embrace and make the most of this happy invention.
whichever of the two they may deem it to be ? In parlia-

mentary bills, nothing at all and in private study, there
:
is reason to fear, as Our Prime Minister's last

little.
work on the old, old subject of the poems of Homer,

came out almost simultaneously with the announcement
from Paris of twenty nations being about to meet there
in fraternal union and international congress on their
growing metric system and since then, cruelly remind-
;
ing of Nero playing his lyre while Rome was burning,

the same eloquent orator has written on the superior
glory of that man who invented a fiddle, over him who
achieved the modern locomotive, the support of millions
on millions of mankind !
Perhaps it was better for the British country that that

minister should have been so employed for he might ;
have done worse than merely let us drift on under

other guidance than his. But things cannot and will
not, stop there this
: view, the pro-French metric
champion. President Barnard, makes very plain. We
may indeed thus far have been saved from a pit of
evil vastly more profound than appears on the surface
but politically we have not as yet reached any haven
of metrological safety no soundings are touched no
; ;
secure principles for anchoring to, reached and no argu- ;
ments of sufficient power to stand before the specious

insinuations of French metrical agitators have yet been
uttered in the House of Commons. We have our
ancient national measures still, but with all their
mediaeval and modern imperfections on their head and ;
the attacks, open and concealed, of the metrical party

upon them on that account, are unceasing. That party,
moreover, has gained over the School Board Commis-
sion the new office of the Warden of the Standards has
;
been gorgeously supplied with expensive apparatus for

French vacuum weighing and measuring and men ;
who ought to have died rather than give up their

opinions of a dozen years ago, have swallowed them

all, and join now in recommending the total de-
nationalization of our ancient metrology.
How long will our plastic rulers, accustomed to take
demagogic pressure from without, in place of principle,
knowledge, and understanding, stand firm against such
agitation ?
The very anxiety of President Barnard and the

metricalists to bring on the final struggle as between
the French metre and the English yard, shows that
they have good reason to know that there is weakness
in the supporters of the latter. Some involuntary
throbbing, moreover, in the pulse of humanity is now
telling all nations, with deeper truth than any philo-
sophy can, that these are the last times of this dispensa-
tion and that we are now or never to decide a long, long,
;
future. " If the work was to be done over again," writes

President Barnard, with an admirable sense of justice,
*'
the French metric system ought to adopt, and doubt-
less would adopt, not their superficial earth measure
the metre, but the Pyramid axial reference of the cubit,
on account of its immense superiority in science.* But
it is not to be done over again," he says, " and never
can or will be we must choose the metrical system as

;
it is now or not at all it has already been taken up

;
by half mankind, and no able system of human inven-

tion will ever have such a chance of universal adoption ;
while no system that cannot and will not become uni-

versal, is to be tolerated for a moment. Now the British
yard, or its third part, the foot," adds the President,
" being only the measure of one nation, will always be
* This acknowledgment of President Barnard, at pp. 93 and 94 of his

book, does him immense honour, he being an out-and-out pro-metre man;
and it is of all the more weight that he gives an abler discussion of the
present condition of the earth-size and shape question by modern geodesic
measure, in all its most scientific ramifications, than has ever yet been
seen in print, in a readable form.
resisted by the majority of nations, — therefore the metre

must in the end gain the day."
The, Bione jprepared without Hands.
But is the final contest only between the metre and

the British yard or foot ? The anti-metric men in the
House of Commons have hitherto succeeded in estab-
lishing nothing against the idea and President Barnard
;
says, both that it is so, and that all the wealth and
numbers of mankind throughout all the world are
divided on these two sides only. He does, indeed, allow
in one place that there is a phantom of a third side,
viz., the Great Pyramid metrology but declares that
;
that, having only a religious foundation, will never

accumulate any large party about it.*
Since the days of Sennacherib defying the God of
Israel, was there ever a speech more likely to call forth
proof, in its own good time, that the arm of the Lord is
not shortened ? We see in Scotland already what the
belief, that it is the Lord who appointed the chrono-
logical institution of the week, will do to make that

one time-measure binding on a whole nation and ;
will the men of that land not also adhere to any such
other weights and measures in the future, as they shall
* The exact words are, at p. 56 :

—
"And one who, like Professor Piazjd
Smyth, bases his metrologieal theories on religious grounds, and prefers
tlie Pyramid inch as his standard, as a matter of conscience, is not likely
to concentrate around him a very powerful party of opposition."
Here everything in the way of linear standards for the Pyramid system
is made by President Barnard to rest on the inch and he intensifies that
accusation at p. 73 by writing :
— ;
" C. Piazzi Smyth almost fanatically

attaches himself to the inch, a measure which he believes with implicit
fiith to have been divinely given to Cheops, builder of the Great
Pyramid, and aiâin to Moses in the wilderness; and in what he, no
doubt, reyjards as the great work of his life, ho uses no other term to
express the largeist dimensions." I can only therefore refer my readers
to all that I have written in this book, as well as others, upon the grand
standard of the Pyramid, and the only one certainly common to it and
Moyes, being the cubit.
come in time to understand were likewise appointed

from the same Divine source ?
President Barnard, in stating the conquests of the
French metrical system at the utmost, bows involun-
tarily to the religious element ; by the act of stating, not
merely that, the metre has been adopted by 160,000,000
men, but by that number of civilized people "in
Christian lands." Yet in that case, if those inhabitants
are truly Christian, will not they all, as well as
Britons, delight to obey in the end, whatever shall
be proved to have been appointed by Christ in the
beginning of the world ? Especially if in evident an-
ticipation of present and future times viz., of " the ;
last days, when scoffers are to appear, walking after

their own lusts and saying, Where is the promise of
His Coming (Christ's Second Coming as a King) ? for
since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they
were from the beginning of creation."
The Parties to the Final Contest.
It is, indeed, most curiously but intimately, between

the French metre and the Messianic Great Pyramid cubit,
that the final contest must come ; for the present Britfsh
weights and measures, as established by recent parlia-
mentary laws only, are evidently doomed to fall.
Now the metric and the Pyramid systems, though on
every other point utterly opposed, are yet in this one
feature, perfectly similar to each other viz., that they ;
both tend to break down the post-Babel separation of

men into nations, and combine them all into one grand
government but then, how is this principle carried out,
:
by whom, for whom, and to what ends, in either case ?

The French metric system, though it is not a hundred
years old, is wanted by its promoters to override every-
thing else in the world, of whatever age, and whatever
origin. All nations are to bow down to it and though ;
€hap. XXIV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 455
it is found, as has been at every essential point, full of

it
scientific blunders, and teeming with sacrifices of the

comforts and conveniences of the poor and many, to the
mere crotchets of a few doctrinaires in the upper classes,
— it is never to be altered, never improved on, never
replaced in its rule over all mankind by anything else

of similar human invention no, not though the pre-
;
—
sent order of human life, national distinctions ex-
cepted, goes on upon this earth, as the human prophets
of the system say it will, for so very many hundreds
of thousands of millions of years that the physical earth
itself will have grown out of shape and size to that
degree, as to become totally unfit to serve as a standard
of reference for the mighty metre, the grand symbol of
human rule in for man, and by man himself alone.
man,
Wherefore President Barnard already, in concert with
other metricalists, though introducing the metre to the
world, first of allas a scientific earth-measure, yet
finally allows that they do not care whether it is, or is
not, of that character; for they intend, by-and-by, to
shut out commensurable reference to the heavens
all
above and the earth below and simply adopt, within a

;
closed chamber, a particular bar. of metal made by man,

as the grand metrological term in which all men, of —
many nations originally, but soon, they think, to be
swept together into one vast commune, shall live and —
move and have any understanding of material things.
The Great Pyramid system, on the other hand, is the
oldest metrological system in the history of the world
has its traces extensively among European peoples ; and
isnext to perfect in all those scientific points where the
French system fails. It is moreover full of benevolence
and compassion for the poor and needy, besides teaching
that their anguish and woes will last but a few years
more for then, agreeably with the Scriptures, Christ
;
himself will again descend from heaven, this time with

angels and archangels accompanying, and will give to

man and righteous government which
at last that perfect
man alone is incapable of; and so shall the Saviour
reign over all nations brought under his one heavenly
sceptre, until that Millennial termination arrives, when
time shall be no more ; and the mystery of God with
regard to the human race will be accomplished.
HuTKian, versus Divine, Ultimate Rule.

Even within the moderate bounds of only one nation,
and for a short space of time, how totally insufficient is
the best human government, to check the evils of
humankind !
With all England's present wealth and science, or not-

withstanding pauperism is increasing in the land
it all, ;
rich men are richer, but poor men are more numerous
and more hopelessly poor, and chiefly in the great cities ;
for there, in truth, the distressed, the miserable, the sick,
the vicious, the under-educated, the persecuted and the
persecutors of society, multiply beyond the rate of all
government, all philanthropy, to procure any permanent
hope of amendment. A good country landlord

relief or
may perhaps be able to supervise, help,. and befriend to
some limited extent every person in his little provincial
community of men of humble ambition and simple life ;
but in the large towns, whence the great wonders of

—
modern civilization emerge there, in precise proportion
as the towns are large, and a few of the inhabitants
rich beyond all measure —
there the houses of the dregs
of the population, and the progressive debasement of
humanity are beyond belief, and go on increasing every
day ;
—
recalling with awe the denunciations of Scrip-
ture against those who join house to house beyond
human power of controlling results.*
* " The truth is that our wealthy and upper classes do not fully realize
the manifold dangers to society arising in the overcrowded dwellings of
But, throw all nations into one vast community or

family of the human kind, as the universal adoption of
the French metrical system would be the beginning of,
and then, no matter whether the movement had been

made sicker (Scottic^ for surer) by the First French
Revolution plan of decapitating all members of royal
families, and whether socialistic communes had been
established in more or fewer lands, —
the scales for doing
the poor. They see only the wonderful advances made every day in
whatever can add to the comforts, conveniences, pleasures, and' luxuries
of their own living. They never dream that their wealth, splendour, and
pride, is surrounded by a cordon of squalor, demoralization, disease, and
crime."
" The higher classes are slow to realise the fact, that in all our large
centres of population there is an ever-increasing amount of poverty,
immorality, and disease."
"From statistical returns in London, bearing on the condition of St.
Giles's, it appears that there were in one district 600 families, and of these
570 severally occupied but one room each. In another, of 700 families, 550
occupied but one room each. In another district, out of 500 families, 450
occujied one room each. Jn one of these rooms, 12 feet by 13 feet, by 7^
feet high, eight persons lived. In another room, 13 feet by 5 feet, by 6^
feet high, five children and their parents lived."
" In Manchester small houses are packed together as closely as possible,
and in them are stowed away an enormous amount of the poorer part of the
population. Six persons in one room, — only one room to live in, sleep in,
and in which to transact all the avocations of life."
" In Liverpool, 26,000 houses are occupied by families in single rooms,
or a third of the whole population exists under these unsatisfactory con-
ditions,
honesty
—are,
producing disease, immorality, pauperism, and crime
to human beings so debased, mere names."
; truth and
**
Our railway extensions, street improvements, the erection of new
houses, public and other buildings, rendered necessary by our ever-
increasing prosperity, act with the force of a screw, forcing decent families
to quit comfortable houses, and in many cases they have no alternative
but to accept shelter in already over-crowded and demoralised neighbour-
hoods, where there is little light, drainage, water, or ventilation, and no
proper convenience for natural wants— and what happens ? After a few
weeks the strong man is bowed down, and the children are left an increase
of pauperism to society." —Extract from the "Social Crisis in England,"
by W. Martin: Birmingham, 1873.
" At the Manchester City Police Court lately, a man and woman,
baby-farmers, living at 126, Knightly Street, Queen's Road, wore charged
with the murder of a ffjmale infant. They wore also charged with attempt'
ing to murder two female infants and one male. The former were dis-
covered lying together on some dirty straw, covered with an old damp
blanket; the latter was being nursed by a boy, and the woman was
detected in the act of trying to conceal the body of the dead child. Two
ounces of mouldy flour was the only eatable thing found in the house."
Edinburgh daily paper, 1873.
mercantile business and for speculating on in every

element of life, must enlarge enormously v/iththe inevit-:
able result, on one side, of a few clever geniuses making

more colossal fortunes, whether honestly or otherwise,
than ever ; but on the other side, of the wretchedness,
the woe, the wickedness, and the degradation of the chief
mass of the population going on increasing in all large
centres of gathering together, and becoming more terrible
in the long future ages than anything chronicled yet.
Contrast this inevitable outcome of human rule, in-

continued for unlimited
creasing infinitely in disaster if
time unchecked by anything above the laws of nature as
philosophers see them now, —
with the sacred system of
the Messiah's monarchy when He shall be in presence
and power over all. . A faint idea of only one of the
characteristics of that kingdom was given in the happy
condition of equality in health and relative prosperity,
in the camp of the Israelites, when setting forth out
of Egypt with Moses not under human rule only, but
;
under the guidance also of the Angel of the Covenant

and when " there was not one Aveak one amongst them."
What are all the triumphs of human learning to that
glorious result in a great nation ; and where has anything
like been seen either before or since ?
it
Butin place of approaching such a desirable consum-

mation for our perishing, yet increasing, millions, modern
science and the churches, politics, war, and police,
are swerving further and further from it every day.
Yet poor science, in so far as it is for once truly so
called, often maligned and never wealthy, viz., the —
exact mathematical science of such men as the late
Archdeacon Pratt, and which was " not at variance with
Revelation," —
has yet proved herself of precious service
to all mankind, if she has enabled us in the present
day of growing doubts, and hearts failing them for fear.
to read off the great pre-historical, and prophetic,

monument of Melchizedek in the land of Egypt an(
;
to find that, besides scientific metrological

knowledge,
it utters things which have been kept secret from the
foundation of the world things which not even the

;
Apostles were permitted to know of, 1840 years ago,

viz., times and seasons which are in God's power alona.
Wherefore thus it is, that the Gre9,t Pyramid is now,
and only now, beginning to announce that a termination
to the greatest misery of the greatest numbers of human
beings, or to their continuing indefinitely under mere
human rule, whether of kings or of republics, is v^ —
length drawing nigh,
4bo OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part V.
CHAPTER XXV.
GENERAL SUMMATION : SECULAR AND SACRED.
T ET US now cast a rapid glance over the principal

-*-^
results obtained in the course of our long research.
(1.) The Great Pyramid, an entirely prehistoric monu-
ment, is found, though in Egypt, not to be of Egypt
i.e., belonging to, or participating with, anything spiri-
tually characteristic of that land and people in their

long course of rebellion against the God of Revelation.
(2.) By being in Egypt, which is central to the land
surface of the whole world, the Great Pyramid becomes
similarly central to the Kosmos of man's earthly life and
habitation but yet has no Egyptian building to compete
:
with it for architectural intention to be in that remark-

able position because it alone visibly stands with appro-
;
priate topographical attributes, over the outspring of that

country's delta, or rather fan-shaped, area of soil. At
the centre of physical origination of the Lower Egyptian
land, therefore, the Great Pyramid was placed ;
yet by
virtue of the sector-shape, both at the centre, and also at
—
one side, of it, -just as with that " altar or pillar to the
Lord in midst of the land of Egypt," and " at the
the
border thereof" which is to be manifested in the last day
(Isaiah xix. 18 20) —expressly to serve at that ultimate
:
time "for a sign and witness unto the Lord of Hosts,"

as well as for a parable and wonder to all intervening
ages (Jeremiah xxxii. 18 — 20).
Chap.XXV.1 the great pyramid, 461
(3.) At every structural point at which it is examined

with sufficient minuteness, ability and knowledge, the
Great Pyramid is found not only unlike the most charac-
teristic buildings of the ancient people of Egypt, but
is actually antagonistic to them. Especially is this the
case in ih€,iT inveterate tendencies to idolatry, animal
worship, assertions of self-righteousness, Cainite boastings
of themselves, with contempt and hatred of all other
peoples. And all these native and indigenous
while
buildings, together with the gigantic stone idols of
Egypt, are doomed in the Scriptures to bow down, and
their country to become the basest of kingdoms, the —
Great Pyramid is alluded to in the most honourable
manner, both in the New and Old Testaments its head- ;
stone being even taken as a type of the Messiah and ;
its being brought forth to view, having been described
there, as a sight which caused the morning stars to sing

together, and all the sons of God to shout for joy, with
"
ci-ies of Grace, grace unto it
*'
!
(4.) The Great Pyramid, in a land where all other

characteristically Egyptian buildings are profusely deco-
rated and covered from top to bottom, and both inside
and out, with inscriptions of portentous length and size
both in writing, painting, and sculpture, the Great —
Pyramid has, in and upon its finished parts, no decora-
"^'"^
tion, no painting, no inscription, no destination given

to it, in any human language under the sun.
And yet, while no other Egyptian buildings can speak
to their own absolute dates, and have set all the scholars
of mankind grievously astray on impossible, ridiculous,
and totally anti-Biblical chronologic schemes, the Great —
Pyramid sets forth its own absolute date on unerring
grounds of astronomical science. Whereupon, being
already allowed by the best Egyptologists to be relatively
* Excepting, therefore, the oft-mentioned rude qnany-marks on the

rough atouei* iu Col. Vyse'a " Hollows of Conbtruction.'*
462 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part
older than all other known buildings of any kind of

pretence, whether in Egypt or any other part of the
ancient world, — the Great Pyramid takes at once the
lordly position of prescribing limits in time to all those
other buildings, orwe may say to all architecture what-
ever and those Pyramid limits are now found to be in
;
an eminent manner confirmatory of Holy Scripture.

(5.) While every other ancient structure of Egypt,
and in so far of the world, was built for its own time
and its then owners, and has had in their day its utili-
sation, its attendants, worshippers, frequenters or in-
habiters, either living or dead, — the Great Pyramid has
had no use ever made of it no living man could enter its
:
stone-filled passages when finished no dead body either

;
was, or could have been regularly deposited there the ;
coffer or so-called sarcophagus is too broad to pass in

any way through the lower part of the first ascending
passage ; —
the king of that time, according to triple
historical tradition, and recently found local indication,
was buried elsewhere neither, until the last very few
;
years, was the building in any degree understood by any

nation, though all nations have guessed at its hidden
mystery, its parable in stone a prophetic and portentous
;
parable, long since thrown in the very way of the ungodly

in order that, " seeing they might see and not perceive,
and hearing they might hear and not understand."
A thousand years ago Al-Mamoun broke violently into
the building, but discovered nothing of its design as now
known and though others smashed many of the stones,
;
chipped the edges of more, and performed whatever

mischief man could perform with axes, hammers, and fire,
— yet they have no more prevented certain grand ideas
with which the whole was fraught in the beginning of
the world, coming to be appreciated in these last very
few years, —
than did the destruction of the Temple of
Solomon and the carrying away of all its golden vessels
Chap. XXV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 463
to assist in the service of idols in Babylon,

the accomplishment of the Hebrew prophecies touching
— prevent
their chief end, the appearance of the Saviour of Man-

kind among the Jews in Jerusalem.
(6.) What then, is, or is to be, the end or use for
which the Great Pyramid was built ?
The confident public is too apt to override this ques-

demand to be promptly told, "Who
tion with the far lower
built the Great Pyramid, and what was his name ?
If you mean who plodded at fulfilling in masonry the
orders given to, and exacted from, them according to
patterns furnished (some of which are still to be seen
on the Pyramid Hill in the azimuth trenches and the

trial passages),* —
I answer,- —
the subjects of the Fourth
Dynasty's Egyptian king, Cheops in Greek, Shofo or
Khoufou in Coptic and they were legion.
;
But if you mean who furnished the design of the

building and saw to its being realised,
"
—
even as the
authorship of Milton's " Paradise Lost was a far higher
work than the hand labour of him who first set it up
in type, — the answer is, Philitis in Greek, Shem or
Melchizedek in Scripture.
And now, those answers to interposed calls being
rendered, let us return to the practical end for which
the Great Pyramid was both designed and built. The
—
manner of that end appears on putting facts together
— to have been, to subserve in the fifth thousand of
years of its existence certain pre-ordained intentions of
God's will in the government of this world of man. For
the Pyramid was charged by God's inspired Shepherd-
A description of both of these very remarkable features, unexplain-

able on any but the strictest *' Promethean," and scientific, theory, is
given on pp. 125 and 185 of vol. ii. of '* Life and Work." While an
account of the happy manner in which W. Petrie was enabled to elicit
the " testimony of the trenches " in favour of the circle-squaring iu-
tentiotial figure of the Great Pyramid, is to be fotmd in my " Antiquity of
latoiloctual Man," at pp. 191—193.
Prince, in human time, to keep a

the beginning of
certain message secret and inviolable for 4,000 years, and
it has done so and in the next thousand years it was
;
to enunciate that message to all men, with more than

traditional force, more than the authenticity of copied
manuscripts or reputed history, —
and that part of the
Pyramid's usefulness is now beginning.
Only as yet beginning wherefore let no one jump
;
too hastily at what the whole purpose may eventually

prove itself to be. I, at least, —
who have been drawn
on by a train of events too wonderful for me to resist,
to devote my best energies to this work ; in presence of
which, I by myself am of the weakest of the things of
the world, —
I presume not to speak to any other than
such parts of the building as have already practically
developed themselves. Herein, too, enough seems now
to have shone forth to enable any one to state roundly,
that the message wherefor the Great Pyramid was built,
is largely of a duplicate character or thus ;
(a.) To convey a new proof to men in the present
age, as to the existence of the personal God of Scripture ;
and of His actual supra-natural interferences, in patri-

archal times, with the physical, and otherwise only sub-
natural, experience of men upon earth. Or to prove
in spite, and yet by means, of modern science which
in too many cases denies miracles, the actual occurrence
of an ancient miracle ; and if of one, the possibility of
all, miracles recorded in Scripture being true.
(b.) In fulfilment of the first prophecy in Genesis,
which teaches, together with all the prophets, that of
the seed of the woman
without the man, a truly Divine
Saviour of Mankind, was to arise and appear amongst
men a man apparently amongst men in poverty, too,
; ;
and humility in further fulfilment thereof, the Great

;
—
Pyramid was to prove, that precisely as that coming
was a real historical event, and took place at a definite
and long pre-ordained date, —

so His second coming,
when He descend as the Lord from heaven, with
shall
the view of reigning over all mankind and ruling them
all with one Divine seeptre, and under one all-just,
beneficent, omnipotent sway, that that great event will

likewise be Kistorical, and will take place at a definite
and also a primevally pre-arranged date.
Now let us look a little closer into the first of these

two reasons, or purposes ; viz.
(A.)
In an age when writing was a rarity indeed, and barely

more locomotion was indulged in by any of mankind
than merely to roam with flocks and herds from summer
to winter pasturage and vice versa, and this only in little
more than one central region of the earth, in that —
primitive age it was announced that the day would
come, when of the multiplication of books there should
be no end, —
when knowledge should bo wonderfully
increased, and men run to and fro over the whole earth,
even as they are doing now by railway and steamer from
London to the very Antipodes. In the interests of
commerce they do it every day and in the interests of
;
science, they are on the eve of specially doing it from

every country of Europe and America, at unlimited ex-
penditure of national wealth, —
though only to gain a
little more knowledge of the exact numbers to be set
against a particular datum in astronomy which has

already been ascertained within a hundredth of the
whole amount, and has had thousands and tens of thou--
sands of money spent upon it. And all these countries
are highly encouraged and applauded for so continuing*
to spend their national resources and results of taxation
of the people, because this is the scientific age of the
H H
46^ OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part Y;
world, when science-knowledge to the most minute and

microscopic degree has so excessively developed amongst
mankind, that every one is open-mouthed for science ;
and science is supposed to enter into, and support, and

deserve the best of, every ramification of life.
Therefore, it would seem to an Omniscient

be, that
mind which foresaw in the beginning the whole history
of the world under man, ordained that the message,
arguments, proofs, of the Great Pyramid should not be
expressed in letters of any written language whatever,
whether living or dead —
^but in terms of scientific facts,
;
or features amenable to nothing but science, i.e., a medium

for the communication of ideas to be humanly known
and interpretable, only in the latter day. The employ-
ment of a written language, moreover, would have been a
restricted mode of conveying the message essentially and
characteristically to one nation alone whereas the Pyra-
;
mid's message was intended for all men, even as Christ's

kingly reign at His second coming is to be universal.
Trace, too, the several scientific steps by which this
purpose of the Great Pyramid is being, and has been,
accomplished and note how each and every one of those
;
steps, while of the most important class for all science, is

yet of the simplest character to be looke'd on as being
any science at all —
so that the poor in intellect, and
:
neglected in education, who are the many, may partake

of it, as well as the more highly favoured who are only
a very few.
Not in the day of the Great Pyramid
all, but rather
at
no 'pure miathe-
since the revival of learning in Europe,
Tnatical question has taken such extensive hold on the
human mind as, the " squaring of the circle." Quite
right that it should be so, for a time at least, seeing that
the basis alike of practical mechanics and high astro-
it is
nomy. But as its correct quantity has been ascertained,

now more than one or two hundred years ago, and, under
Chap. XXV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 4.6^,.
the form of tt, or the proportion of the diameter to the:

circumference of a circle, is found in almost every
text-book of mathematics to more decimal places than
there is any practical occasion for (see page xvi.),
men might rest content and go on to other subjects.
But numbers of them do not, and will not hardly ;
a year passes even in the present day, but some new;

squarer of the circle appears. Generally a self-educated
man, and with the traditional notion in his head,
that the proportion of length between the one line-
already straight and the other to be made straight in a.
circle, has never been ascertained yet ; and that either

the Academy of Sciences in Paris or the Royal Society
of London has offered a large reward to whoever will
solve the problem : so down he sits to the task, and
sometimes he brings out a very close approximation to.
the first few places of figures in the fraction, by prac-.
tical mechanics and sometimes by erroneous geometry
;
he produces a very wide divergence indeed. But occa-

sionally the most highly-educated university mathema-
ticians also enter the and bring out perchatice
field,
some new by which a more rapid con-

algebraic series,
vergence than any yet invented to the true numbers of tt
may be obtained ; see for instance such a case in the last
volume (XVII.) of that most important one now amongst
the scientific serials of the world, the Smithsonian con-,
tributions to knowledge (Washington, 1873) ; besides its
references to similarly intended formulae in other recent

mathematical works. Wherefore that numerical expres-
sion 3 14159 -h&c, shown on all hands and in all
is
countries, to be one of the most wonderful, lasting, char

racteristic, and necessary results of the growth of science
for all kinds and degrees of intellectual men and in an ;
increasing proportion as they arrive at a high state o^

civilization, material progress, and practical development.
Is it not then a little strange, that the first, aspect
which catches the eye of a scientific man looking with

science and power at the ancient Great Pyramid, is, that
its entire mass, in its every separate particle, all goes to
make up one grand and particular mathematical figure
expressing the true value of tt, or 3 '141 59 &c. +
If this was accident,
was a very rare accident for
it ;
none of the other thirty-seven known pyramids of Egypt

contain it.* But it was not accident in the Great
Pyramid, for the minuter details of its interior, as
already shown, signally confirm the grand outlines of
the exterior, and show again and again those peculiar
proportions, both for line and area, wliich emphatically
make the Great Pyramid to be, as to shape, a tt shaped,
and a tt memorializing, Pyramid or the earliest demon-
;
stration known of the numerical value of that particular

form of squaring the circle which men are still trying
their hands and heads upon.f
Physical Science of the Great Pyramid.
Again, in physics, as a further scientific advance on

the foundation of pure mathematics, is there any ques-
tion with interest to all human kind as,
so replete
what supports the earth when, as Job truly remarked,
;
it hung from
is nothing, when it is suspended over
empty space, and yet does not fall ? In place, indeed,
The learned Dr. Lepsius enumerates sixty-seven pyramids where- ;
upon Sir Gardner Wilkinson remarks, with irresistible pMthos of modesty

and feeling, " hut it is unfortunate that the sixty-seven pyramids cannot
now he traced."
t In further reference to the ante-chamher case in chap, x., where the
Ahhe Moigno had already produced the neat expression, from its measure
in inches, of — =
2 tt, — Professor Hamilton L, Smith, including the
anterior and posterior passages with the length of the ante-chamher, and
taking account also of the breadth, similarly in Pyrairid inchps, finds,
in those terms, (1 -f- ,r) X
10; (tt -f tt"^) X
5 ; and (tt^ tt^)
all of them given well within the limits of error of the best modem
+
5,— X
measures, as set forth in " Life and Work," vol. 2.
Chap. XXV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID, 469
of falling destructively, tli6 earth regularly revolves

around a bright central orb,and in such a manner as to
obtain therefrom light and heat suitable to man, and
day and night. What is the nature, then, of that path
which the earth so describes, and what is the distance
of the physical-life luminary round w^hich it now
revolves, but into which it would fall straightway as to
its final bourne and be destroyed by fire, if that onward
movement were arrested ? As in squaring the circle,

so in measuring the distance of the earth's central sun,
both learned and unlearned have been working at the
question for 2,300 years, and are still for ever employing
themselves upon it and nothing that all nations can do,
;
whether by taking their astronomers away from other

work, or enlisting naval and military officers as tem-
porary astronomers, and furnishing them profusely with
instruments of precision of every serviceable science,
and sending them to every inhabitable, and some unin-
habitable, parts of the earth, is thought too much to
devote to this question of questions in physics for the
future behoof of a world grown scientific. Yet ilmre is
the numerical expression for that cosmical quantity nailed
to the mast of the Great Pyramid from the earliest
ages ; for it is its mast or vertical height, multiplied by
its own factor, the ninth power of ten, which is the
length all modem men are seeking, and struggling, and
dying, and will continue to die, in order to get a
tolerably close approach to the arithmetical figure of:
and this accurate sun-distance at the Pyramid is accom-
panied by an exhibition of the space travelled over
during a whole circle of the earth's revolution, and the
time in which it is performed.
And if from solar-system quantities we turn to matters
of our own planet world in itself alone, does not every —
inhabitant thereof yearn to know its size and yet was ;
not that impossible to all men, of all the early ages, to

'47P OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part v.
attain with any exactness ? In illustration whereof it is
recorded, that the Deity confounded Job at once with

the words " Hast thou perceived the breadth of the
:
earth ? thou knowest it all." *

Declare if
And the only answer that Job, one of the chief and
wisest men of the earth at that time, could return,
was
" Therefore have I uttered that I understood not
things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and
ashes." f
But which all mankind from
precisely that thing
the Creation up to the day of Job, or of Moses, had not
accomplished, and had no idea or power how to set
about to perform it, and did not make even any rude
attempts in that direction during the following 2,500
years —
-though they do know it now with considerable
accuracy —
was not only well known to the author of
the design of the Great Pyramid, but was there em-
ployed as that most useful standard, in terms of which
the base-side length is laid out ; or with accurate decimal
reference to the earth's peculiar figure,its polar com-
pression, the amount and the most perfect

thereof,
method of preserving the record for all men.
Who but the Lord could have done that wonder
above man's power then to do ? For, " Have ye not
known ? have ye not heard ? hath it not been told you
from the beginning ? have ye not understood from the
foundation of the world ? It is He that sitteth upon
the circle of the earth." It is He
hath also "Who
measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and
meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended
the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the
mountains in scales and the hills in a balance." J
* Job xxxviii. 18. f Job xlii. 3, 6.
' -
J Isaiah xl. 12, 21, and 22.
1
Ghap. XXV.] THE GREAT PYRAMID. 471
Who, indeed, but the God of Israel could have

performed this last-mentioned still greater wonder than
any mere linear measure, so far as its exceeding diffi-
culty to men even in the present scientific generation
is concerned and could have actually introduced, both
;
into the King's Chamber Coffer, and the said chamber

itself, an expression for the next most important quality,
after size, of the earth-ball we live upon viz., its —

" mean density ;" besides expressing in the base dia-
gonals of the Pyramid the enormous cycle of years

composing the earth's disturbed rotation or precession
period of the equinoxes ; a period six times as long as
the whole historic life of man yet accomplished, and
the only known phenomenon keeping longest records,
for
suitable at once to all degrees and states of men.
Science not the Great Pyramid's Final Object.
Yet with all this amount of science brought before

us out of the Great Pyramid, yea even with all this
quintessence of scientific results, let us not be run away
with by the notion of some, —
that to teach science,
was the beginning and end for which that building was
erected. Certain men, I do indeed know only too well,
"will not go astray in that direction for they have ;
already wandered off into the opposite error of assum-

ing, that the many successive results deduced from the
measures of the Great Pyramid, cannot be each and
every one of them intentional, or indicative of any
wisdom of Divine Inspiration, — because each of them,
after the was a necessary mathematical result
first,
from, and consequence of, any Pyramid whatever, if it

had a shape and size so far given.
This reasoning is strangely short-sighted ; because in
the both the shape and size required the supe-
first place,
rior mind to choose and decide them and then, no ;

second or third cosniical result has been yet deduced,

from any necessary subsidiary features in the size of the
Great Pyramid, without introducing, at the same time, a
second or third unit of measure of diverse order, and
connected with the first, by no features of the mere
geometry of the Pyramid, but rather by allied physical
researches and Biblical readings. As, for instance, after
the whole vertical height, undivided, was appropriated
for sun-distance, — ^then the unit of a sacred Hebrew cubit
was employed for the days of the year when applied to
the base-side length ; and finally the earth's axis com-
mensurable inch for the amount of a year's precession,
in conjunction with the length of the base-diagonals.
While the earth's mean density, if expressed in the same
inches cubed, is obtained, not from the same parts or
any necessary deductions from those parts of the whole
Pyramid, but from the totally independent features of
the King's Chamber and the Coffer which were abso- ;
lutely separate results of the mind of the designer of

the whole structure, and are to be found in no other
Pyramid, temple, or tomb whatever. '
Further Fallings Away from Simple Fact and Truth.
Another class of modern educationists, however, have

lately deviated towards still another point of the compass
of error ; as thus : —Throughout all Sir Isaac Newton's
dissertation on cubits, he dwells on nothing more for-
cibly,and explains nothing more clearly, than the abso-
lute antithesis between the cubit of the Hebrews and
the cubit of the Egyptians. Each of them was sacred to
its own party but, while the sacredness of one of them
;
is confirmed by Scripture, the sacredness of the other is
sinfulness there it is profane in Scripture.

; Yet some
men have been lately deceived into fancying that there
are just as many glorious cosmical coincidences in the

size of the sacred Great Pyramid and its parts when
measured by the profane cubit of idolatrous Egypt, as
by the cubit which Moses told the Israelites was the
cubit of the Lord their God.
This cannot be, if the Pyramid contains original
Messianic allusions. But it may be ahnost so ; for again
and again Scripture warns us to beware of temptation
and the wiles of the tempter, —
that sin can put on so
specious an appearance of sanctity, that almost all men
shall be carried away by its devices and the danger ;
will never be greater than in the very last times

immediately preceding the Lord's Second Coming for ;
then Anti-Christ shall appear personally, giving out

that he is Christ, and working such signs and wonders
as shall deceive, if it were possible, even the very elect.
A nearly parallel case, in the ancient land of the
Great Pyramid (recorded doubtless for our guidance), is
that of the enchantments of Pharaoh's Egyptian priests

with their rods, against the heaven-performed miracles
of Aaron's rod. The enchantments of either side for
a while were almost the same, for either party turned
their respective rods into serpents large or small ; but
in the end, Aaron's grand rod swallowed up all the
unholy brood of petty snakes from the rods of the Egyp-
tian priests and then those unhappy men were totally
:
unable to go on any further with their enchantments.

Now apply this case to the metrological rods still
surviving, — viz., the sacred cubit of Moses on one side,

and the profane cubit of Egypt on the other, and both
of them in the Great Pyramid. The former has its first
grand acknowledgment of its really ruling there for the
Lord its originator, in giving forth the days of tbe year,
when applied as the standard of measure to the side of
the base of the whole structure ; i.e., the side of the
ancient base, divided by the days of the year, gives the
length of the sacred cubit of Moses, and showsit to be
the lO^th part of the earth's semi-axis of rotation in

length. But the profane cubit of Egypt is not so pro-
duced, or producible by, or from, any of the leading
dimensions either of the bodies of the solar system, or
of the Great Pyramid. No, indeed, it is only by going
to a much smaller part —
the King's Chamber, and
chopping up its length into twenty little bits, that then
an approximate representative of the profane cubit of
Egypt, 20-61, rather than 20-7, Pyramid inches long,
is obtained ; and some secondary physical phenomena
are said to be evenly commensurable therewith.
But what Pyramid authority is there for any Chris-
tian, for sacred purposes, chopping up that grand unit,

the King's Chamber length, into twenty parts and pro-
ducing all this vermin swarm ? None that I know of,
for there is no twenty marked in the room and the
;
floor length is, in actual fact, one noble whole, which

no one should dare unauthorizedly to destroy as such.
Yet still, what one given scientific reason, intellectual
men are obstinate in asking, can be shown, for preserving
that lenofth of the Kinof's Chamber untouched ? It is
a fact, so far but does it mean anything in, and by,
;
that whole length a length which, so far as we can

;
superficiaUy see, says nothing in favour of the sacred

Hebrew cubit, or decimal numeration, or notable Pyra-
—
mid parts, but rather the contrary ? Up to July,
1873, myself had not the slightest idea and it was
I ;
only when in pain and distress at the falling away of

some of my best friends towards both the profane cubit
of Egypt, and the sidereal year of a few doctrinaires and
two of the Pyramid measurers only, in place of going to
the solar year of all humanity and of all of the Pyramid
measurers taken fairly, —
that suddenly, not by my own
penetration, but rather by a veil being withdrawn from
my eyes, I suddenly understood what had been before
me for eight years, as well as published for six years to

all the world, and yet had never been guessed at either
by me or the world.
The length of the King's Chamber, as taken from
the mean of all my measures (because far more numerous
than those of any one else), is 41 2 '132 Pyramid inches :
it ismoreover the longest granite line in the Pyramid,

and admirably adapted, with its level position, polished
rectangular ends, and uniform temperature, for a good
measure being made of it. Indeed, it is the best
modern measured line of the best preserved of the
ancient parts of the whole Great Pyramid.*
But still, demand the querists, why was not so con-
spicuous a length made a round number of sacred cubits ?
Because was intended to typify reasons as well

it
as facts, I am now enabled to reply for it expresses,— ;
1, the length of the base-side of the whole Great Pyra-
mid, agreeably with the mean of all the direct measures

thereof ; height 3, its tt shape
2, its vertical 4, the ; ;
metrological combination of sacred cubits and earth-

commensurable inches and, 5, the absolute length of
;
that sacred cubit which was ordained of God, in after-

ages, to Moses and the Israelites.
* My original measures of the King's Chamber are given in " Life and
Work," vol. pp. 101, 102, in British inches, and with the mean taken
ii.
rouglily. They are also given similarly at page 178 of this book. Here,
with the same original numbers, they are turned from British into Pyra-
mid inches, and the mean taken more exactly, or to three places of
decimals introducing the breadths observed also
; a necessary refine-
;
ment, now that from Mr. James Simpson's sums of the squares (see page
181), the breadth of the chamber may be inferred to be theoretically and
exactly half of the length, and •wilh the following result for the final
mean of the whole :
[412-182
412-182
Final means for each element, giving double
J 412'054
weight to the lengths directly measured ^ .
412-054
412188
Grand mean of all the elements concerned = 412*132 P. in.

All these several things out of one and the same set
of numbers ?
Yes, out of one and the same set of numbers, when

used on certain principles of calculation of which plain
indications are given on the walls of the ante-chamber
to the King's Chamber by the original builders viz., ;
the diameters of a circle and square of equal area with

each other together with a reference of this theorem to
;
a length of four times 103 inches and a fraction long.*

That length can, of all lengths thereabouts, of course
be no other than the 41 21 32 of the King's Chamber
floor itself.
Now 412*132 is, no doubt, an awkward-looking
fractional and uneven number, bearing no easy or
self-evident proportion to the known length of base-side
or vertical height of Great Pyramid, or to Pyramid
numbers of inches, or cubits, or to the value of tt.
But, following the hint given in the ante-chamber

(Captain Tracey's most discovery), and
suggestive
calling those Pyramid inches 41 2 '132
412-132
Pyramid, or sacred, cubits (of 25 such inches each),
consider that number, I say, of cubits the diameter of a
circle and then,
;
* Four lines of thut length, deeply and grandly cut, are on the south
wall of the ante-chamber. We
have already taken them as symbolising
a division of that Wall-surface, transversely into 5; as they do, and have
led us from that circumstance to recognise thw division of the walls of the
King's Chamber into five courses. But they do not, therefore, cease to be
four lines; four lines, too, of a certain length. The exact original
length is now a problem, for the lower part of them is broken away in
the general modern breakage of the top of the anle-chamber's south
doorway, and it niay have been as much as 105*6 inches (viz., the dif-
ference between the height of the doorway and that of the ante-cham-
ber), if the lines were continued to the very corner. But wliile that
original completeness is not proved, the 105-6 is quite close enough to
—
412-132
' and distant from any other competing line, for all the ante-
chamber's purposes as a mere synopsis of what is to he found in the

King's Chamber, to refer one to the 412- 132, and leave all cxa;titu(ie to
be obtained from that length, as there laid down, in one whole accurate
quantity.
(1). That circle has equal area with a square (see

coraputation below *), each side of which measures
365-242 + &C. sacred cubits ; or is equal in those cubits
to the length of the socket side of the Great Pyramid
from the mean of measures and equal also, in
all the ;
days, to the universally acknowledged number of days

and parts of a day in a mean solar tropical year; i.e.,
a solar year for the general times and season purposes
of all mankind.
Next (2), consider that same length of 412-132
cubits to be the side of a square, — that square is of
equal area with a circle whose radius z=z 232-520 H-&C.
sacred cubits \'\ also =
the already concluded height of
the Great Pyramid from all the measures ; equal also,
when reduced back from cubits to inches, very nearly
to the mean of the two distinct heights which the
King's Chamber so curiously possesses in simultaneous
412-132 = diameter of a circle = log. 2-6150363

Find ita area . X 2
5-2300726
Add log. of
^
Log. area of required circle
Find length of square of equal area .
Log. side required

Nat. number of side required
t 412-132 = Bide of pquare .
Find area of that square
Log. of area required

Find radius of circle of equal area
Subtract log. of —
Log. diameter
Nat. number of diameter
Kadi us required
478 OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part V:
existence ; or to double the 11 6*26 length of the ante-

chamber floor.
Further (3), the diameter of a circle having

232*520 + &c. for radius {is to) the periphery of a square
:
whose side length =

365*242 + &c.. of the same units
: 1 TT, the grand and leading Pyramid proposition.
: :
(4.) When Pyramid inches inside the King's

Chamber are found to tally with sacred cubits measured
outside the Great Pyramid to the 1,000th part of
unity, not only in giving a coincidence in numbers,
but in assigning a good scientific reason for them,
we cannot but allow that those Pyramid inches and
those sacred cubits were acknowledged and used by the
designer of the entire structure. And finally,
(5.) The absolute length of the sacred cubit of the

Great Pyramid and Moses, is deducible now to the ten-
thousandth of an inch from a direct measure of the
most glorious and best preserved part of the ancient
structure, viz., the King's Chamber, on being simply
computed according to the modern determination of
the value of tt and length of the year and comes out ;
from the local measure of 412*545 British inches to be

2 5 -0 2 5 -f- &c. British inches.
In which case that whole quantity of length of the
King's Chamber floor has an importance of symbology
and signification in its integrity, which enables it in a
moment to overcome and swallow up all that artificial
'brood of little, useless, profane cubits which ill-advis6d
persons had attempted to manufacture out of its supposed
cutting up and defies them to produce, in terms of their
;
units, or by means of their enchantments, overthrown

like those of the old Egyptian priests, anything of equal
importance to men, religion, and history, either in —
the Pyramid's structure or the cosmical order of nature.
These modern Pharaonists have even brought them-
selves under more solemn cognizance for ;
" Produce your causes, saith the Lord bring forth your strong reaaons,
;
gaith the God of Jacob.

" Let them brinu: them forth and shew us what shall happen let them
:
show the former things, what they be, that we may consider them, and
know the latter end of them or declare us things for to come."
;
Isaiah xli. 21, 22.
— i.e., things which the scientific and sacred theory of

the Great Pyramid seems to enunciate in its second
part,
(B.)
This second part of the end wherefore the Great

Pyramid was built, I have already said, appears to begin
somewhat thus; viz., to show the reality, and the settled,
as well as long pre-ordained, times and seasons for each
of the two comings of Christ. Both for that one which
has been, i.e., which was 1873 years ago, and under whose
then commenced spiritual dispensation we are still living ;
and also for that other one, in kingly glory and power,
which is yet to beam upon us.
When, that second coming has been appointed to take
place, must be a most momentous question and is one to ;
which I can only reply, that, so far as the Great Pyramid

seems to indicate at present in the Grand Gallery, the
existing Christian dispensation must first close (in some
partial manner or degree), the saints be removed, and
a period of trouble and darkness commence for how ;
long, it is difficult to say, seeing that the scale of a

Pyramid inch to a year appears to change there.
Very long the time can hardly be, if the Pyramid
standards of the metrology of that universal kingdom,
the only successful universal kingdom that there ever
will be on earth, the kingdom of the Lord Christ, are
already beginning to appear from out of the place of
security where they were deposited in the beginning of
the world.
But that place of security, the Great Pyramid, is ia
Egypt. Is Egypt ready to receive the Lord ?
48o OUR INHERITANCE IN [Part V.
Of Egypt in the latter day, incomprehensibly won-

derful things are recorded in Scripture. It is apparently
to be the first of the three, —
Egypt, Assyria, and Israel
and the Lord of Hosts shall bless it, saying, " Blessed be
Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands,
and Israel mine inheritance." (Isaiah xix. 24, 25.)
But previously to that day, and after the Great Pyramid
shall have become manifested as a sign and a witness to
the Lord of Hosts, —
there shall go up a great cry unto
the Lord from the land of Egypt "for they shall cry
:
unto the Lord because of the oppressors, and he shall

send them a saviour and a great one, and he shall deliver
them. And the Lord shall be known to Egypt, and the
Egyptians shall know the Lord in that day, and shall
do sacrifice and oblation yea, they shall vow a vow
;
unto the Lord and perform it. And the Lord shall
smite Egypt he shall smite and heal it
; and they shall
;
return even to the Lord, and he shall be entreated of

them and shall heal them."
The New Policy of Old Egypt
Now what is this great cry to go up unto the Lord

from Egypt and because of the oppressors ?
Of old, all men who drank the waters of the Nile on
either side of the lower part of the course of that river,
say from Assouan, say even from the Second Cataract in
Nubia down to the sea, i.e., from the very furthest distance
that can pretend to any Coptic civilization or people,
all these men
were considered to belong to Egypt.
But within the
last few years an insane ambition, or
a hardening of the heart, has touched the Court at
Cairo, to apply the ancient proverb to length all along
the stream, as well as distance on either side of the
lower part only and to maintain, that all lands through
;
which the Nile flows, and from which it comes (though

those lands have remained utterly unknown to, and un-

visited by, Egyptians from the beginning of the world),
belong by right to Egypt. The main reason, as yet
given forth, why modern Egypt
should have a right to
attack and take possession of the other Nile countries,
and not they, take Egypt, seems to be, that Egypt is the —
only one of them all which has astonished and delighted
mankind (but oftended God) through forty centuries with
.triumphs of ornamental architecture, glories of sculpture,
and mysteries of painting and wisdom. Wherefore every
zealous paid servant of the Egyptian state has now to
argue this case to the outside world and to maintain ;
victoriously against all comers, that His Highness the

Khedive, being the direct successor of Rameses the
Great, is fully justified in sending up armies to make
war on all men and countries so far as they may be
found eventually on the course of the Nile because he ;
has an hereditary right forcibly to annex them all, even

right away into the southern hemisphere, and bring
them under Egypt's inevitable Pharaonic rule.
The scheme has a certain air of grandeur about it
so majestically ignoring all ordinary ideas of what con-
stitutes a casus belli ; and the very notion of present-
day Turks, who cannot draw at all, and are bound by
their religion to eschew everything in the shape of
human portraiture, — the idea of them of all men claiming
the reward due to Egypt's ancient artistical and her
skill,
sculptured idolatry too, — is rich beyond expression. But

the wisdom wherewith the subtle measures for accomplish-
ing the purpose are being taken, a feat transcending
diplomacy ; and yet,
— is
" the Egyptians are men, and not

God and their horses flesh, and not spirit
;
wherefore ;
"^^
out of those very steps and means, as the pride that goeth
before a fall, it may be that the close of the Turkish
rule will come.
Isaiah xxx. 1, 3.
I I
Slave-holders possess Egypt

In setting up again, and in a new French garden, as
the officials of the Khedive are now doing, the statues
of Rameses, and the stone and metal idols of old Egypt,

in order to claim aesthetic credit with European dilet-
tanti (who themselves dabble far too much in the
accursed thing), these Egypto-Turks are losing their
only claim, as Mohammedans, to any favour from the
God of Israel over the reprobate, image and relic-wor-
shipping. Christians of the East. These degraded men
being apparently the wretches who, though plagued by
the locust and scorpion-like Saracen armies that pro-
ceeded out of the smoke from the bottomless pit, yet,
to the last, " repented not of the works of their hands,
that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold
and silver, and brass and stone, and of wood which ;
neither can see, nor hear, nor walk." (Rev. ix. 20.) And
the Khedive's ruse of sending up a large army to the
sources of the Nile, under an Englishman forsooth, to
annex all the negro countries he should discover, to the
slave-power of Egypt, —
for the pretended purpose of
putting down the slave-trade, when its result can only be
to give into the slave-holding hands of the Egyptian
Government more extensive and uncontrolled supplies
of slaves than ever, — while that ruse carries deception
to a point beyond which probably the arch-deceiver
himself could no further go, it may be the very item that
was required to fill the catalogue of woe, and bring the
question of the slavery ofmankind to its last footing.
The English emancipation was great ; the Russian
greater ; the American still greater ; but the Egyptian,
may prove to be the greatest of all ; for with it, the slavery
of Constantinople and of the Mohammedans generally,
will fall too and that slavery of theirs includes another
;
horror within itself, far beyond all that Christian slavery

ever did ; for it requires Government manufactories for

converting boys into odious machines, guard the fit to
multitudinous hareems of rich Mohammedans and the ;
pains, the woes, the slaughter amongst the poor innocents,

before the fell purpose of their tyrant masters is accom-
plished, can be known to God alone.
''
Oh, but when the slaves do reach Cairo (for these
heinous manufactories are a long way up the river), they
are well treated," say some would-be apologists for the
secret system of slave-marts which they know go on in
Egypt, in spite of all the counter protestations to Europe
by a Government which profits by, and uses, them. When '
'
the slaves do reach Cairo," say these well-meaning but

weak apologists, "they get considerate masters, enter rich
households, and pass far more easy, comfortable lives,
than any of the independent Arab, or Coptic, fellahs in

their agricultural villages."
" But the principle is bad," insists a man of sterner
mould, ''and the results must therefore be degrading
to the master as well as the slave not to say anything
;
of all the previous and some following cruelties, which

shall make so many afficted ones in the land of Egypt,
cry to the Lord because of the oppressors. And though
the Lord may have long tarried, the time will come, and
the Great Pyramid indicates it to be near, when, in some
supranatural manner, God shall send them a saviour and
a great one, and he shall deliver them."
The Egypt of the Lord Christ.
If, then, the present possessors of Egypt be not those

of whom the Lord Christ is likely to say (at least, in their
present and most unrepenting state), when His personal
reign begins,
— *'
Blessed be Egypt, my people, and
Assyria, the work of my hands, and Israel, mine in-
heritance," —who are those favoured ones, in and for

Egypt, likely to be ?
Of the present localities of the ancient Assyrians, we

do not know much, though there is a growing idea that
they have drifted with the human current of history
westward from their original habitats, and are now to
be found amongst those whom the ethnologists delight
to call Indo-Germans but who seem phlegmatically con-
;
tent to be, and remain, an inland, continental people

without a single foreign possession. But of Israelites
our nation is now becoming, even year by year, through
means of the works of John Wilson and Edward Hine,
far less blind than it has been through all the previous
period of its occupation of these Isles of the Sea which
contain us now ;from whence too we have overflowed
both to rule with order, enlightened justice, and a firm
hand among many Eastern nations, and to occupy and
make to blossom the '' desolate heritages " of distant
parts of the earth. While the resemblance of our
earliest Saxon, or Ephraiifnite, metrology to the system
of the Great Pyramid, both gives us a species of " Inherit-
ance" interest in that building, and may include some-
thing else still more noble in connection with the coming
universal Messianic kingdom when, " All the ends of
:
the world shall remember, and turn unto the Lord and :
all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before him."

That is, when such kingdom of the Lord's shall at last
be established. But before then, what ? —
Only last year, when the Abbd Moigno, in Paris, was
advocating amongst his countrymen, with a heavenly
patriotism higher than all patriotism usually so-called, the
weights and measures of the Great Pyramid and pleading ;
for them as belonging to that government whose Father

—
and King is God, he was met by a noted savant of the
Academy with the argument, " No let us keep to our!
own invented French metre because Great Britain,

;
1
with an inch so very like the Great Pyramid's inch,

would have a glorifying advantage over us if that ancient
system were to be universally adopted."'""
Alas has national rivalry or national envy driven
!
modern Frenchmen to so suicidal a policy as this

And at the same time, has national apathy, if not
apostacy, brought some Englishmen so low, that it is
even now, within these last very few years, that they
have begun to talk about abolishing their own heredi-
tary measures, and propose to throw in their metrolo-
gical lot with the all-compelling republic, to be perhaps for
a moment, under the Communistic French metric system,
and amid the general drifting (which is now going on)
of all the classically descended nations into infidelity.
If, on the one hand, in the coming contest of the
standards of measure, the promises of God made to our

nation of old, are abundant beyond what the heart of
man could conceive —
on the other, our responsibilities,
;
perhaps dangers, are most grave. For though on one

side we are Scrip turally told (in connection with the pre-
parations for setting up the Messiah's kingdom), that it
shall be " when God has bent Judah for Him, filled
the how with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, Zion,
(Israelites of both houses,) against thy sons, Greece^
and made thee as the sword of a mighty man,"
Let us "be not high-minded but fear," when on the
other side we also read, in the same undying scroll,
*'
The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying
bows, turned back in the day of battle."
May the Lord in his mercy, preserve all those who
have once put their hand to the plough, from ever
looking back.
• "Lea Mondes," November 7, 1872, p. 393.

APPENDICES.
APPENDIX I.— MR. WAYNMAN DIXON'S CASING-STONE.
II.—DPt. GRANT'S CRUCIAL PYRAMID INVESTI-

GATIONS.
III.— DR. LEIDER'S SUPPOSED PYRAMID.
IV.—MR. JAMES SIMPSON'S FURTHER PYRAMID

CALCULATIONS.
v.—RUDE STONE MONUMENTS VERSUS THE

GREAT PYRAMID.
VI.—RECENT ATTEMPTS TO SHORTEN BOTH

THE GREAT PYRAMID'S BASE-SIDE AND
THE PROFANE CUBIT OF EGYPT.
I.] APPENDICES, 489
ME. WAYNMAN DIXON'S CASINa-STONE.
nPHIS fine example of one of tlie old casing-stones of the

-*-
Great Pyramid, is a recent acquisition in further illus-
tration of Chapter II., and was discovered by Mr. Wajmman
Dixon, C.E., in 1872, loose, and forming part of the mediaeval
hill of rubbish on the north side of the Great Pyramid.
Not only is it the largest casing-stone fragment which has
yet been brought to Europe, but it has this superior feature
of interest above aU known examples; viz., that it has
portions of the two original, worked, end surfaces, as well of
the top, bottom, and sloping front.
It is therefore the only casing-stone from the Great Pyramid
of which we know, or may measure, the ancient length from
one end side to the other. Eor although the far larger
casing-stones in situ discovered by Colonel Howard-Vyse near
the middle of the north foot of the Great Pyramid, might
easily have been measured in similar length, — and perhaps
were, before being mischievously broken to pieces by night
depredators, as related by the Colonel, — still no actual
measures of the length of those stones are extant, so far as I
am aware.
There is not indeed any theoretical necessity, in view of the
first and chief purpose for which casing-stones of the Great
Pyramid are usually interrogated (viz., the angle of slope or
bevel of the front, compared with the horizontal planes of the
top and bottom surfaces of the stone), that we should know
their length from side-end to side-end. But in the example of
this, Mr. Waynman Dixon's casing-stone, when its length was
at last, and very recently, measured by him, it was found so very
close to the formal quantity of 25 inches, as inevitably to raise
490 APPENDICES. [I
some question whether tliat lengtli had been intended. For

such intention would have been equivalent in that place, both
to exhibiting the length of the linear symbolical standard of
the Great Pyramid, and showing, by its proportion to the
whole base-side length of the monument, the number of days
—
and parts of a day in a year, a piece of practical astronomy
far in advance of all men in that early age.
This at present unique stone, then, having been kindly pre-
sented to me by Mr. Waynman Dixon, has been formally
deposited in the Library of the Royal Observatory, Edin-
burgh, at 15, Royal Terrace, and is roughly of the following
leading dimensions :
20*6 inches high, from level bottom to level top surface

36'7 ,, deep, or from front to back, at the bottom ;
20-3 „ ^ „ „ „ „ top;
_
26-2 ,, in slope, from bottom foot up to top of sloping bevelled face; and
25-5 „ long, from side end to side end, at front.
But on attempting to arrive at much accuracy of measure-

ment, there are several further details to be taken into
account, as thus ; —
The original worked surface forming the
back of the stone, is entirely gone or broken away, and only
fragments (sometimes much less than the half) of each of the
other five worked surfaces remain. Hence a necessary pre-
liminary -to any exact measure proved to be, the making up
of each broken surface-plane to its ancient completeness of
superficies by appl3dng thereto either a flat drawing-board or
a sheet of plate-glass held in contact position.
Even this method, unfortunately, was not quite accurate or
fair to the ancient masons, because the full truth of their sur-
faces was intended by them to be tested only by the circum-
ferential border thereof, —
^the central region of every surface,
except the bevelled slope, being slightly lowered beneath the
borders ;and in no case is there now any opportunity of
measuring all across one of these surfaces, or from border to
border. Making, however, between such parts of any worked
surface as were still extant, the best compromise which the
case admitted of, the following results have been obtained
since the earlier chapters of this book were written :
1. The top and bottom surfaces of the stone are not quite
parallel for, while their mean distance apart (or height) is

;
20*63 British inches, their particular distance is,

I.] APPENDICES. 491
(1) At back of stone . on east side =• 20-41, and on west side 20-42 =
(2) At front top ... „ „ =20-62 „ „ =20-65
(3) At front top, pro-
duced 80 as to be
vertically over the
front foot of the
stone, .... „ „ =20-78 „ „ =20-71
2. The errors, or variations of height seen above, are evi-

dently of a nature which would have tended to being cor-
rected, had the back borders of both bottom and top surfaces
been in place. But it is otherwise with the length of the
stone from side-end to side-end, both at different heights, and
still more at different distances from front to back for the ;
error there is not only in the other direction, but is far

larger and is directly of such a kind, as to make the back of
;
the stone broader than the front, or to cause it to be wedged in

and held fast when built into place. And this was the very
feature of Great Pyramid masonry, combined often with stone
cramps, which gave Colonel Yyse so much trouble when
excavating into the south side of the monument for he could ;
only get each stone out by breaking it into pieces in situ, and
drawing it forth piecemeal. Accordingly we find for Mr.
Dixon's casing-stone,
Length from end side to end side, at back foot . . = 28-2

. ins.
„ „ „ at back top . . == 27-8

.
„
„ „ „ at front top . . = 26-2
.
„
„ „ „ at front at middle level = 26-6
.
„
„ „ „ at front foot at lowest level = 24*9 „
3. Hence the sloping or bevelled front of the stone cannot

be said to be accurately, or simply, 25 inches long from side
end to side end. It is indeed of that length at a level of
about 6 inches above its base, because it is 0*3 inch shorter
than that at the very base, and 1*2 inches longer at the top ;
but that is a very different thing from being 25 inches broad

all the way up and all the way down.
4. The vertical height of the stone having been determined
= 20-63 inches, to within '01 inch at the best part of the
block for measuring the slope length of the bevelled front
and the latter having been determined to be somewhere
between 26*22 and 2624 inches that is equivalent to saying
;
(after trigonometrical computation) that the angle of slope is

between 51° 53' 15" and 51° 49' 55". And these quantities
492 APPENDICES. [I.
evidently contain the theoretical angle of the Great Pyramid,

51° 51' 14", between them very fairly.
The angle of the stone might perhaps have heen obtained
closer than the limits of the 3 minutes above given, had
the mass been either larger, or in that exceptionally fine
state of preservation which Colonel Yyse's magnificent ex-
amples in situ were in, when he discovered them. But this
other example which we are discussing, besides having
experienced some tremendous violence by falls or blows (as
testified to, by its great conchoidal bases of fractures) has
certainly weathered somewhat, even on the best-preserved
parts of its front slope so that near the bottom thereof, in
;
one place, there is part of a fossil shell (a very unusual feature

too in the Mokattam limestone) sensibly projecting above the
general surface, and capable of vitiating the result of measure,
if not specially guarded against, by 0'05 of an inch, amounting
there to 8' of angle.
"Wherefore it is more than ever to be regretted, that
Colonel Yyse's two colossal casing-stones, so exquisitely
preserved almost intact for 4,000 years, or from the primeval
and prehistoric days of the earth down to the year l-SST a.d.,
have been wiKuUy destroyed within the last forty years of
the scientific and educated age of the modern world, for no
known object.
IL] APPENDICES. 493
II.
DE. JAMES GEANT, OF CAIEO, ON SOME CEUCIAL

POINTS OF SIZE AND STEUOTUEE IN THE
GEEAT PYEAMID. By Letter dated 8th December,
1873.
(a) the coffer's pathway into its present abode.
Prelimina/ry Explanation hy P. S.
Although it is usually held, on the sepulchral theory of the
Egyptologists, that the passages of the Great Pyramid were

formed, both in size and angle, for nothing but the convenience
of introducing the coffer, or sarcophagus, to its present final
resting-place, yet there are some remarkable limitations
opposed to that idea by leading mechanical features, thus :
1. The cofi'er being, without any lid, of the same height

as the door of the King's Chamber, within the fraction of an
inch, —and an orthodox granite sarcophagus
lid having always
stood 6 or 7 inches higher than the sarcophagus itself, the —
cofi'er could only have been introduced lidless, or not in
sarcophagus fashion at all.

2. Even lidless, could not have been got in under
the cofi'er
the corner in the ceiling of the entrance-passage when trying
to pass from that passage into the first ascending passage.
Both of these objections are generally admitted by every one
who has been at the Great Pyramid, measuring-rod in hand
but the latter of the two difficulties was recently sought to be
obviated by the suggestion thrown out by a London engineer
— that the cofi'er had never been required to turn the above-
mentioned comer, because, instead of being introduced into
the Pyramid by the descending entrance-passage, it had been
brought into an unknown chamber on the base level, from
494 APPENDICES. [H.
whence lie conceived that an ascending passage commenced to

the exact angular line of the first ascending passage
rise, in
produced downwards, through the floor of the entrance-
passage and the masonry beneath it.
This would evidently have been a complete method of
avoiding the one alleged difficulty of turning a corner, if
indeed such a lower chamber and continuation passage
really existed; but though the engineer went out to the
Grreat Pyramid, and bored in divers directions, he could dis-
cover no symptoms of either one or the other. The question
was then started, whether, even if such a passage did exist,
the cofi'er could pass end first (and also without a lid) through
the whole length of the known and existing Pyramid passages
to the King's Chamber. And then came up the circumstance,
hitherto chronicled only in ''Life and Work," that the lowest
part of the first ascending passage is so much contracted in
breadth, in order to enable the conical granite block there to
act as a cork-portcullis, that the coffer could not get through
by an amount of about 0-3 of an inch.
The engineer, however, refused to accept these measures,
and after going to the place, announced that he had found
that the coffer wouU pass the contracted point by a quarter of
an inch clear a statement which both raised hopes again in
;
many minds that the lower chamber and passage really

existed, and even produced some indignation against my
measures in ''Life and Work" being so erroneous^ "that by
themselves they would have prevented any search being made
for so promising an addition to our knowledge of the Pyra-
mid's interior."
Now my measures of the breadth of the coffer, and the
breadth of that contracted part of the first ascending passage,
had not been made either relatively to each other or with the
knowledge of any important question depending on a com-
bination of the two each had been measured by itself in
;
absolute terms at the several times I was in each part of the

Pyramid referred to ;
—
and they were only confronted with each
other several years after the thus separately obtained results
had been printed. Knowing therefore, on one side, how pos-
sible it is for any one to make a larger error in two separate
absolute measures, than in a difference ;but on the other
side, that no one who measured the end of the coffer simply
and hastily in the present day, would get either the original
II-.] APPENDICES. 495
breadtli of that end, or the present breadth of the chief part

of the length of the vessel (by reason of the chipping that
has been perpetrated all the way up and down the corner
edges, requiring special methods of elimination, and not easy
ones, in the darkness of the King's Chamber), —knowing, I
say, these conflicting practical difficulties, I requested Dr.
Grant, if his manifold official employments should permit him
so to do, to go out to the Great Pyramid from Cairo, and make
a new and careful mensuration of the two breadths, one after
the other, with the same measuring-rod, and with attention
to the coffer's peculiarities of fracture mentioned above.
This he has now happily done, and describes thus,
*'
On December 5th I went out to the Pyramid, taking Mr.
Waller (an English dentist in Cairo) with me. For the
breadth of the lower end of the ascending passage, I measured,
not as you did, the breadth of the portcullis stopping it up,
but the breadth of the passage itself, at that point. Not, how-
ever, that that should make any sensible difference, for I
don't think it would be possible to insert the thinnest kind of
paper between the portcullis and the passage wall.
''
The result of my measurement confirms yours, viz., the
coffer in King's Chamber, although turned straight into axis
of ascending passage, could not have been passed along it.
«•
Lower End of AscBNDixa Passage, measured close to North End

OP Portcullis, in British Inches.
Breadtli from east to west, across top or north edge . 38-38

Ditto, across middle
Ditto, across bottom or south edge .... 38'44
38*12
Coffer in King's Chamber.

Breadth of north end 38-62
Breadth of south ead 38-76
"These are my measures, and I can vouch for their accu-

racy within \ inch.
"•
I think this strengthens the theory of the coffer having
served some other purpose than that of a sarcophagus, as all
sarcophagi have been introduced to their chambers hy the
passages leading to themP
4q6 appendices, [II.
(b) comparative qualities of material and work of

several granite parts of great pyramid.
Writes Dr. Grant :

'-'
Mr. Waller has taken for me a perfect
cast or rather impression of the boss on the granite leaf, also
of a normal part of the ante-chamber, also of a normal part of
wall of King's Chamber, and also of a normal part of outside
of coffer.
''
These show distinctly that the coffer has had a finer polish
than the walls of the chamber containing it still the King's
;
Chamber has been remarkably well polished, only the granite

appears of a coarser grain than that of which the coffer is
composed.
''Neither the ante-chamber, nor granite leaf, nor boss
have been polished, but simply very accurately picked. Be-
tween granite leaf and north wall of ante-chamber no attempt
seems to have been made even to level the surface of that
part of the wall, so that on the east side there is quite a large
bulging on the granite wall."
(c) This part of the letter refers to a small peculiarity of

one of the five ''pigeon-holes " on either side of the chasm at
the north beginning of the Grand Gallery (see Plate XIII.),
and' also to the oblique, cruciform stones let into the wall,
over against each of the holes in the ramp, beginning with
the fourth from the north end. But this inquiry is not yet
concluded (see p. 380).
IILl APPENDICES,
III.
DE. LEIDEE'S SUPPOSED PYEAMID.
The late venerable and Eev. Dr. Leider, of Cairo, enlarged

much to me, in December, 1864, on the beauty (in German-
English) of a little pyramid which was just visible on the
western horizon, or far away in the Libyan desert, as seen
from the summit of the Great Pyramid.
In April, 1865, on ascending that monument, I verified the
account so far, that there was out there in that direction a
conical eminence, which might be either a natural hill or a
rounded and ruined pyramid, I could not, at so great a dis-
tance, say which."
Only after my return home did I fully appreciate the
singularity, if the eminence was a pyramid, of such an erec-
tion being found so far away from the desert frontier line of
Egypt, when all her other pyramids conform closely thereto.
I made inquiries, therefore, far and wide as to any traveller,
living or dead, having been into the desert in that direction,
but without success. In the meanwhile, both Dr. and Mrs.
Leider were dead and three different parties whom I had
;
successivelyprimed on this particular pyramid subject when

they were going out to Egypt, failed to perform their promised
little piece of exploration.
At last, in 1872, Mr. Waynman Dixon, fortified by the
companionship of Dr. Grant, of Cairo, took the field. A for-
midable party of their special acquaintances among the
pjramid Arabs rushed to accompany them, on camels, with
long guns and ancient battle-axes and after a ten-hours'
;
march into the thirsty and barren desert, westward from

the Great Pyramid, they reached the conical mound the —
veritable Dr. Leider's pyramid; but, as it turned out, not
a true or built pyramid, or artificial structure of any kind
K K
498 APPENDICES. [III.
merely a natural eminence; to which fact a reef of rock

cropping out near the summit sufficiently and immediately
attested.
A useful negative was thus given to sundry pyramid specu-
lations, on a passage from Josephus, touching the second of
the two scientific monuments built by the righteous descend-
ants of Seth in their anti-Cainite visit to the land of Siriad,
which had been flying about for several years and the party
;
was rewarded in the way of natural-history science by find-

ing close to the hill the remains of a petrified forest, in the
shape of silicified and jasperised trunks of trees some of
;
them remarkably well preserved, and others worn out of

shape by the long ages of driving desert sand which they
had been exposed to. But Mr. Waynman Dixon and Dr.
Grant having visited the scene of this geological discovery of
theirs several times since then, a further and fuller account
may, I believe, shortly be expected from their pens.
IV.] APPENDICES, 499
lY.
ME. JAMES SIMPSON'S FUETHEE PYEAMID CAL-

CULATIONS: m A Letter from Himself.
Edinburgh, \bth December^ 1873.
My dear Sir,
I have the pleasure to return the four letters on Great
Pyramid measures which you kindly sent me on 8th current,
and in doing so would take the opportunity of mentioning
the following points, some of which you may not have
noticed.
As before stated, the diagonal of either end of King's
Chamber bears to length of Pyramid's base the same pro-
portion nearly, that one day bears to the number of days in a
lunation. The error is however too great to be neglected,
for it makes the base-side 9127'84 Pyramid inches, instead
of 9131-05, or more than three inches too short. Yet the
relation seems intentional ; for when all four sides, of the base
are taken as the measure of a lunation, then, instead of the
above-mentioned diagonal, we have the circuit of the King's
—
Chamber floor equal to 12 of the chamber's units, and also
to the 24 arris lines of the coffer —
as a not altogether
unfitting representative of the cycle of a day. To represent
the year on the same scale would however require a circle
with radius 71,871 inches. In connection with this it maybe
noted that the King's Chamber floor consists of two squares,
each of which has an area in exact decimal miniature of the
surface of a sphere described about the sun, at the mean
distance of the earth in other words, each half of the floor
;
would receive 1-1 0^2 of the rays of a vertical sun, shining

constantly upon it, or the whole floor would intercept the
same fraction of its rays, shining 12 hours out of the 24.
This decimal relation is a simple deduction from the theorem
500 APPENDICES. [IV.
which, connects the King's Chamber's proportions with the

Pyramid's vertical height, and that which connects the
vertical height with the sun's mean distance. The division
of the said sphere-surface into lO^^ equal areas is in a manner
contemplated in the origin of the Pyramid for, dividing the
:
sphere's equator into 10^^ equal parts for meridians, and its
axis into 10^^ equal parts for latitude planes, —
these parts
will be respectively 365*242 and — inches. The portion

of the sun's surface corresponding to one of these parts would
be about -9148 square inch.
It is a fact curious enough in itself, and which perhaps
furnished the Pyramid builders with a natural precedent for
their extensive adoption of the same ratio, —
that the volume
of the sun is so nearly 1-10^ of that of the sphere just referred
to the mean radius for the sun which would give that ratio
;
exactly, being 426,272 British miles. Prom which it would

also follow that the sun's volume is 10^^ times that of a
sphere whose radius is the height of the Pyramid for the :
latter sphere is to the sphere of the earth's mean distance

from sun, as 1 lO^x^ and lO^x^ divided by 10^ is lOô.
: ;
There is another and smaller sphere which may have some-

thing to say here. You have shown that Solomon's '^ Molten
Sea" was, as to its general form, almost certainly a hemi-
sphere, and its hollow contents a remarkable gauge of the
size and weight of the earth. If its outer diameter were
250*4756 Pyramid inches, or but a fraction, greater than the
10 S. cubits assigned to it, the contents of the whole sphere
would be just 1-10^^ of the sun. And nearly the same result
would be brought out by considering its form as slightly
spheroidal, so as to make the vessel a perfect model, on a
scale of 1-2,000, 000th, of one hemisphere (in equatorial section)
of the earth. Then, if the hollow interior were similar, and
its contents 50x71,588 Pyramid cubic inches, —
or l-20th of
the sphere described about the King's Chamber, —
the thick-
ness of the brass, varying from 5*7244 and 5*7229 on the
principal equatorial axes, to 5*7146 on the polar axis, would
be eminently expressive, in inch-units, of nearly the same
—
earth-density as is denoted by such interior capacity namely,
5*727.
There is implied in the foregoing a certain near commen-
surability in size between the earth and sun, which can
I
IV.] APPENDICES. 501
be readily shown by comparing both with the Pyramid's

altitude. Let the mean diameter of the earth (say 501, 106, 000
Pyramid inches) be divided by a million, and by the cube
root of 10 the result will be 232-5924, or the number of S.
;
cubits in 5814-81 inches, while the theoretical height of the

Pyramid is 5813-01, or 1-8 inch less.
Letting this difference
pass, it will the earth's mean diameter were
be seen that if
half as great as it is, the volume of the earth would then be
10^^ times the sphere whose radius is the Pyramid's height,
while the sun is 10^^ times the same, and is therefore =
1,250,000 earths. But in order that this should be exactly
true, the earth's mean diameter would require to be 500,950,000
Pyramid inches.
The ratio of the Pyramid's height to the earth's diameter
isthe duplicate or square of that of the earth's ellipticity at
—
some one meridian the ratio to the mean diameter being
l-293'606th, which is probably not far from the ellipticity of
the Pyramid's own meridian. Let E linear value of this =
ratio, M= earth's mean diameter (or its diameter at the
Great Pyramid ?), and A= Pyramid's height. Then
A:E: E: M; orAM=:E2
:
and expressing M in terms of A (see preceding paragraph),

A (40,000 v^To A) = E2; or 40,000 \/iTA2 = E^
Square root of which =. im V\^ k = E
And 100 ^10 A -%
From this and previous propositions it appears that
(neglecting small differences) the Pyramid's height is commen-
surable, in terms of integral powers and roots of 10, with
1. The difference between the polar and some one equa-
torial radius of the earth ;
2. The earth's mean semi-radius

3. The sun's mean radius and, ;
4. The mean distance of the sun,

or moan radius vector of
the earth's orbit
or with decimal parts of these quantities.
502 APPENDICES. [IV.
The theory of squares in Queen's Chamber gives for the

cuhic diagonal of that room 356*915 Pyramid inches. This is
doubtless nearer the truth than the 356-04 derived from your
mean measures, which are uncorrected for wall-incrustations,
—and accords very nearly with another theoretical quantity
obtained as follows. Ten million is the number of S. P.
cubits in the earth's semi-axis of rotation, or of 50-inch cubits
in the whole axis. If 10,000,000 square inches be formed
into a circle, the diameter of that circle, divided by 10, will
be 356'8246, or the cubic diagonal of Queen's Chamber. But
356-8246 is the diameter of a sphere whose contents are
= 1000 coffers divided by 3, or -3- 71,365 ; and 356-8246 x
lîs also 71,365. Again, if 10,000,000 cubic inches (the

5
capacity of the Queen's Chamber) be formed into a sphere,

the diameter of that sphere, divided by 10, wiU be 26*73008,
or the interior breadth of the coffer and 267*3008 squared
;
is 71,449. A" more direct connection between Queen's

Chamber and coffer is this, that the cubic diagonal of the
former is just 4 times the cubic diagonal of the interior of
the latter 356-8246
: ~ =
4 89-206 or 356-915 -r 4
; 89-229 = ;
as compared with 89-168 from your mean measures of coffer.

Hence, if 10,000,000 square cubits be taken, and made into a
circle, that circle will have a diameter of 89,206 inches, =
1000 coffer diagonals. But it is possible th-at the 4 interior
diagonals of this vessel (perhaps also the 4 exterior dia-
gonals) were purposely of different lengths. For instance,
the mean length of the Pyramid's arris lines^ divided by 100,
is either 89-0946 or 89*3404, according as the base-side is
called 365*242 or 366*25 S. cubits; and the latter number
cubed gives 10 times the coffer's contents, or 713,090 cubic
inches; while the mean (89*2175) agrees with the coffer
diagonals derived above from Queen's Chamber.
If the cubic diagonal of the exterior of the coffer were 4
times the interior breadth, or 106-920 (my measures however
give only 106*468), it would make the circumscribed sphere
just one-tenth of that inscribed in the King's Chamber's
height : for 230*3886 -^ y'To'= 106*912.
Perhaps the coffer's size, shape, and position in the
Pyramid may be indicated in the following way. Mr. F.
IV.] APPENDICES. 503
Petrie lias observed that it stands at a level of 100 times

its own height, below the Pyramid's summit :
Let 40*9954 (King's Chamber semi-diagonal -r- 2 tt) =

least or central height of cofferthen Pyramid's height,
;
O813-01, —4099-54 =
1713-47,= level of toj^ of coffer
above Pyramid's base.
Let 41*4096 =
greatest or corner height of coffer then ;
5813-01 — 4140-96 = 1672-05, = level of hottom of coffer

above Pyramid's base.
And the square roots of 1713*47 and 1672*05 are 41*4
and 40*9 nearly.
Let 5813-01 be divided into two parts, such that the
square root of the less shall be 1-1 00th of the greater,
these parts will be
ia) 4117*57,
(J) 1695-44,
and will represent the mean level of coffer, or level of its
centre. And the square root of (5) = 41*1757 is the coffer's
mean height; while the square root of [a) = 64*1683 is
the mean of its mean length and breadth which dimen- :
sions, combined with a proportion of 3 : 7 for length and

breadth, give for cubic contents of exterior 142,704, or
71,352 X 2.
Also if 4117*57 be taken as radius, then circumference
(or perimeter of plane through Pyramid at level of coffer's
centre)=25,871*5 or the years in Precession Period;
agreeing closely with cubic diagonal of King's Chamber,
measuring to foot of walls, X 100, = 25,873.
As the sum of the 24 arris lines of coffer is circuit of =
King's Chamber floor, their mean length, and also the
difference between length and breadth of base, will be
51*5165 inches, =
diameter of a sphere whose contents are
71,588, which, though larger than most of the values for
coffer's contents, seems entitled to some weight, as it is
repeated in the sphere described about King's Chamber.
It would appear that the numbers 3, 5, 7, and 10 (whose
sum is 25) play a prominent part in both the King's and
Queen's Chamber, with this difference, that while in the
King's Chamber 3 is coupled with 7, and 5 with 10, as in —
the arrangements of the coffer, tt proportions, and general
*'fiftiness" of the room; —in the Queen's Chamber it is 3
504 APPENDICES. . [IV.
that is associated with 5, and 7 with 10, —

as in the 3x5
arrangement of the squares, the 7 sides and 10 angles of the
room, its 5 X 3 an is lines, and its 10''' inches' capacity.
I am, my dear Sir,
Yours very truly.
Professor Piazzi Smyth, JAMES SIMPSON.
15, Royal Terrace.
Postscript.
king's chamber heights.

With reference to the collection of my theoretic results for
the size of the King's Chamber in Pyramid inches at p. 181,
it is correct so far as it goes, but would have been completer
for all the other —

problems to be solved ^besides the one you
were then treating of, viz., my sums of the squares if you —
had added the second height which the room possesses and ;
which, if the first height =

230-3886, is according to your
measures at the place, =
230-3886 + 5*0 Pyramid inches
say 235-3886.
My theoretic results acknowledge the necessity of such a
second height to the room; for while its geometrical sym-
metry and some connections with outside of Pyramid, as well
as an apparent reference to the earth's size and density (in
height H- a density of 5-70424 being =
to? side of a cube
equal to the earth), depend on and come out excellently with
the first height the cubic capacity of 20 million inches, and
;
the TT relation between length of room and circuit of north or

—
south wall ^results not less important to a scientific monu-
—
ment only come out on using the second height. At the
same time, however, theory is not able to assign in every
case one and the same precise value to the increment of
second over first height; for in one problem it makes the
quantity 4*85, in another 5-11 Pyramid inches, indicating on
the mean 5-0 inches very nearly. "While finally, the reference
from chamber length to vertical height of Grreat Pyramid
demands a chamber height almost equal to the mean of the
two heights viz., 232-52 Pyramid inches. A quantity, how-
;
ever, specially known to the architect, its exact half being

represented in the 116-26 length of the ante-chamber, mul-
tiplied by 50 in place of 25.
J. S.
v.] APPENDICES. CO;
v..
BUDE STONE MONUMENTS VERSUS THE GEEAT

PYEAMID.
Under tlie firsthalf of the above title, the chief philosophic
architect of our time, James Fergusson, D.O.L., has published
during the last year an important octavo volume of 532 pp.,
and 234 illustrations: and the book is abundantly descrip-
tive of rough Cyclopean stone circles, such as Stonehenge,
Avebury, Stanton-Drew, &c., and of all the occasional rows
or groups of stones which, however rough, have evidently
been brought to their places and set up by the hand of man,
and are now known as dolmens, kistvaens, menhirs, crom-
lechs, trilithons, &c., &c., both in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
After brushing away the dust of supposed prehistoric, and
with some persons even geologic, ages of antiquity and after
;
disestablishing the Druids from temples they were only theo-

retically promoted to, long after they had disappeared from
the surface of the earth under the sword of the E-omans
Mr. Fergusson successfully shows (avoiding indeed the earlier
chambered tumuli of Lydians, Pelasgi, Etruscans, &c., and
—
keeping chiefly to the extreme west of Europe) he shows, I
repeat, that the dates of all the chief examples of these rough
and rude stone, or stone and earth, erections are certainly
confined within periods of from 300 to 900 a.d., and were
commemorative chiefly of the successful military exploits of
those various new peoples who appeared in Europe at that
time from the North and East, and established themselves on
the ruins of the Roman Empire.
In so far this author's subject has nothing in common with
the Great Pyramid, whether in its perfection of finish or
vastly earlier date of erection yet for all that is the Great
;
Pyramid lugged into his book, and with such an effort at

5o6 APPENDICES. [V.
mischief to the sacred and scientific Pyramidal theory, that a

few words in explanation of what he considers he has accom-
plished towards that destructive end and aim of his ambition,
may not be thought unsuitable here.
Under pretended cover, then, of following the method of the
Pjnramid scientific theorists, Mr. Fergusson demurely speaks
of the size of his rude stone circles (which he knows were
built some 1,200 years ago) being, as a rule, either 100 feet,
or 100 metres, in diameter.
Whatever may be said for the feet, of course Mr. Fer-
gusson understands, and no one better, that the old circle
builders could not have had any modern French metre
among them but he asserts that such a standard is what
:
legitimately comes out, as the rule, when the scientific

Pyramid methods of theorising are applied to the measui'es
of the size of his stone circles and that he therefore and
;
thereby not only obtains a short and easy method of de-

scribing their size, but also of reducing to absurdity what-
ever has recently been written for the sacred and scientific
character of the Great Pyramid. And yet he is so mortally
afraid of his character being injured in London society,
by any one possibly supposing that he has admitted the
truth of the smallest part of the said sacred and scientific
theory of the Great Pyramid, merely because he has touched
—
upon it at all, that although he has " Piazzi Smyth his
theories " in his index, —
^yet the subject-matter so alluded to
does not appear in the large and readable letterpress of Mr.

Fergusson' s book, but in the almost invisible small print of
a note, and even then with the following bashful apology for
himself: —
''I am almost afraid to allude to it, even in a note, lest any
one should accuse me of founding any theory upon it, like
Piazzi Smyth's British inches in the Pyramids, but it is a
curious coincidence that nearly all the British circles are set
out in two dimensions. [Mark that, if you please, gentle
reader: Nearly all the British circles are set out in two
dimensions.] The smaller class are 100 feet, the larger are
100 metres, in diameter. They are all more than 100 yards.
The latter measure (metres) is, at all events, certainly acci-
dental, so far as we at present know, but as a nomenclature
and memoria technica, the employment of the term may be
useful, provided it is clearly understood that no theory is
v.] APPENDICES. 507
based upon it:" and there then follow throughout Mr. Fer-
gusson's book his frequent allusions to the stone circles, as
being either 100 feet, or 100 metre^ circles.
Now, though in the above extract I could not but be
shocked at the learned architectural D.O.L.'s triple blunder
of Piazzi SmyWs discovery of British inches in the Pyra-
''''
—
mids," in place of ^^ John Taylor^ discovery of earth-com-
mensurahle inches being founded upon in the unique, primeval,
and anti-Egyptian design of the Great Pyramid;''^ still I
thought myself bound to accept, until the contrary had been
proved, that the celebrated Mr. Fergusson had really alighted
on a very curious numerical coincidence having the degree of
closeness alone recognised in modern Grreat Pyramid theoris-
ing, amongst his rude stone circles. In which case, all honour
to Mr. Fergusson, no matter what the consequences of his
discovery might ultimately prove to be.
With the best desire therefore to appreciate the truth and
cogency of James Fergusson' s remarkable 7?w(?, I have noted
one after another, as they came up, the following measures of
the stone circles, out of his own hook:—
Page 51, chambered tumulus, stated, in diameter

b5,
62,
62,
62,
63,
75,
76,
78,
78,
85,
124,
124,
127,
139,
139,
140,
141,
146,
149,
149,
149,
158,
160,
160,
161,
161,
5o8 APPENDICES,
age 161, stone circle, by scale, diameter

v.] APPENDICES, 509
heaven rustled among their leaves, still murmured forth,

*'
Midas has the ears of an ass."
But Mr. Fergusson is not always timid, for how he does
delight to stamp upon painstaking Dr. Stukely, the lion of
200 years ago, who himself measured and mapped in the field
so many of the rude stone circles. That work was perhaps
Dr. Stukely' s forte; wherefore, when Mr. Fergusson, at his
own p. 149, makes such a mull as to name a ciicle of 345
feet in diameter, ''a 100 -metre circle," 100 metres amounting
only to 328*09 feet, why did he not remember to say that his
predecessor. Dr. Stukely, had remarked two centuries ago
on many of those old circles having been laid out in round
numbers of the far older, and indeed contemporaneous, 'pro-
fane cubit of Egypt ; especially when that cubit, being taken
in its double form of the cubit of Karnak, is equal, in its
100 midtiple, to exactly 345 feet, or the very quantity which
Mr. Fergusson had then before him to explain, if he could,
without sinning against both mensuration truth and the
sequence of history ?
But there is worse to come.
THE AECHITECTURAL FACTS OF THE GREAT PYRAMID.
In his p. 31, speaking of the Great Pyramid, Mr. Fergus-

son truly allows it to be '' the most perfect and gigantic speci-
men of masonry that the world has yet seen;" and that,
according to mere human methods of developmei^t and pro-
gression, almost infinite mjrriads of years must have intervened
between the first rude tumuli, or stone sepulchres erected in
Egypt, and the building of such a pyramid.
But in that case there ought to be vastly more stone monu-
ments in Egypt hefore the day of the Great Pyramid, than
after it, especially as in the dry Egyptian climate we are told
again and again that '* nothing decays ;" and then comes the
stunning announcement, both from Mr. Fergusson, Dr.
Lepsius, and every good Egyptologist, that there are no
monuments at all in Egypt older than the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid, therefore, according to all the known
facts of the longest known country on the face of the earth,
led oft' the art of stone architecture in Egypt in a sudden uprise
to excellency, or a totally difi'erent manner from all human
510 APPENDICES. [Y.
experience of what always is, and must be, wlien man works
by bis own powers alone, unassisted by direct Divine inspi-
ration.
Of this astounding, and humanly unexplainable, abyss of
nothing of architectural remains at all before, but an abun-
—
dant train after, the majestic Grreat Pyramid, Mr. Fergusson
says in another foot-note, '' it is so curious as almost to justify
Piazzi Smyth's wonderful theories on the subject."
And what does Mr. Pergusson therefore do ? Does he
consent to the cogency of these, as well as all the other,
facts of his own and his own still more
professional science,
peculiar methods of philosophising upon them in order to
elicit the monumental history of man and confess, that so
;
far as they go, they do lead to nothing less than a Divine

intervention in the history of man having here occurred in
the primeval times of the human race to the end that this,
;
even still unequalled, glory of building, the Great Pyramid,

appeared suddenly on the stage of history as when the Lord
;
says through Isaiah (xlviii. 3), ''I did them suddenly and
they came to pass " ?
Nothing of the kind. The unhappy man merely wraps
his mantle of prejudice more tightly than ever around him ;
and after actually attempting to thrust down the throats of

the public the same improper unction which he has been
applying to keep down the conscience-pricks of his own soul,
exclaims, in the forced words of endeavour to shame the facts
— '* But there is no reason whatever to suppose that the pro-
gress of art in Egypt differed essentially from that elsewhere.

The previous examples are lost, and that seems all."
That all, indeed !Why, that is admitting everything and ;
implies the destruction and total disapi)earance, without leav-

ing a wrack behind in the most preservative of all climates,
of more architecture than is now standing on the surface of
the whole globe: and the admission may further worthily
include what Mr. Fergusson nowhere allows (though the
Great Pyramid scholars do), viz., the truth of the Noachic
deluge, the dispersion of mankind according to the Bible,
and the innate wickedness of the human heart.
VL] APPENDICES. î
VI.
EECENT ATTEMPTS TO SHOETEN BOTH THE GEEAT

PYEAMID'S BASE-SIDE AND THE.PEOFANE
EGYPTIAN CUBIT.
The —
following short paper, having been sent to the Eoyal
Society of London on October 27th, 1873, and not having been
heard of again by me, except that it was received there, up
to the time of going to press with this Appendix in January,
1874, it is printed here in the interests of truth and fact.
P. S.
On the Length of a Side of the Bme of the Great Pyramid, ly

Piazzi Smyth, F.R.S.
My attention has been directed to the abstract of a paper

in the Proceedings of the Eoyal Society for June, 1873
(pp. 407 and 408), through its having led Professor Clerk
Maxwell into a serious error in an Egyptian allusion ventured
by him in his otherwise most admirable address on " Mole-
cules " before the British Association lately at Bradford.
The error, published by so influential a body, is far too
grave to be passed over; because, not only does it fight
against the time-honoured conclusions of the first Egyptolo-
gists of the age as to what was *' the common " and indeed
universal cubit length of ancient Egypt not only too does it
;
imply a metrological equality between Egypt and Greece,

—
instead of Egypt and Babylon but because the new length
now assigned to the so-called "common" cubit of Egy|)t is
only brought in at all by its author. General Sir Henry
James, E.E., by means of
1. An unfair selection, twice repeated, of the modern
512 APPENDICES. [VL
measured lengths of the base-side of the Great Pyramid.

And—
2. A meaning attributed by him to certain words in
Herodotus, making them tell the very opposite story to what
they were intended by their real author to do.
These things were indeed shown by me, in their simple
and true light, in Yol. XIII. of the '^ Edinburgh Astronomical
—
Observations," pp. E 67 E 72. But as Sir Henry James now
returns to his errors as though they had never been ques-
tioned, and produces them as part of the regular work of the
Ordnance Survey of Great Britain ; and as they are moreover
on the present occasion issued to the world (in abstract at
least) under the name of the Eoyal Society, and have been
further spread, with damaging effect to the truth in the
—
minds of many, by the British Association on all these
accounts it seems necessary to make some public protest in
the name and for the sake of the three noblest attributes of
scientific man, viz., accurate measuring, truth stating, and
just doing, with a glowing allusion to which Professor Clerk
Maxwell closed his able and eloquent discourse.
OF THE LENGTH OF A SIDE OF THE SQUARE BASE OF THE GREAT

PYRAMID, AS MEASURED BY MODERN SCIENCE.
''The most recent measures of the Great Pyramid's base

side," says Sir Henry James, in the 'Eoyal Society's Proceed-
ings,' " are those made by the Eoyal Engineers and Mr. Inglis,
a civil engineer, and give a mean length of 9,120 British
inches." Whereupon Sir Henry James adopts that quantity
as exactly proving an hypothesis lately invented by himself,
and mentions no other competing measures.
Yet Sir Henry James knew of other measui'es, and quite
worthy ones too of being brought into the general mean
determination. For while in that very Proceedings' paper he
quotes Colonel Howard- Yyse and Mr. Perring for the base-
side lengths of several other pyramids, though he does not
quote them there for the more important Great Pyramid's
base-side length, — he not only did quote those authors in a
former paper in 1867 for that feature of that pyramid, but he
erected them then, under the name of Colonel Howard- Yyse
alone, into his sole authority, not even allowing Mr. Inglis's
result at that time to appear by the side of it.
VI.] APPENDICES. 513
And the reason why Sir Henry James quoted so honourably

Vyse's 9,168 inch measure and extinguished Mr. Inglis's
9,110 inch measure in 1867, was because he (Sir Henry
James) had just then published an hypothesis declaring that
the Great Pyramid's base-side ought to measure 9,168 British
inches.*
While the reason on the contrary why Sir Henry James
does not now continue to quote Yyse's 9,168 inch measure,
but in place of it adopts Inglis's 9,110 (after having meaned
it with his own men's 9,130) inch measure, is, —
because he
has now dropped his first hypothesis, and adopted another
of totally different construction and requiring only 9,120
inches to measure the Great Pyramid's base-side.
In face of a method so unusual in science, as this alternate
selection of some, and concealment of other data to suit
quickly successive, and rashly launched, hypothetical views,
it is but a small, and yet a proper, point for the Poyal Society
to be further informed of; viz., that Mr. Inglis's measures

should not be quoted by any one (and least of all by any
general commanding, and profiting in name and fortune by
the acts of, British subalterns and soldiers), under Mr. Inglis's
name alone seeing that he, Mr. Inglis, was sent to the
;
Pyramid by his then master, Mr. Alton, to do whatever he

did for Mr. Alton at his (Mr. Alton's) expense, and according
to his (Mr. Alton's) previous arrangements for it also on the
ground.
Mr. Inglis, moreover, was assisted by me when at the
Pyramid in findingtwo out of his four station points, when
all his own efforts had failed and his final mensuration
;
results were communicated to me by Mr. Aiton for the first

and only full and authentic publication they have had yet,
viz., in my book, '' Life and Work," published in April, 1867.
All these circumstances too have been knowingly Aeglected
* See Athenceum, November 16, 1867, p. 650. The hypothesis was, tliat
the sole reason wherefore the Great Pyrainid had been built of its actual
basal size was, to allow a side ot the base to measure 360 cubits of 26-488
inches each. That number was stated by Sir Henry James to amount to
764 feet= 9,168 inches, which made the accord appear perl* ct with Vyse's
measure of 9,168 inches. But afterwards it was pointed out to Sir Henry
Jamei that 360 x25-488 amounted to 9,175-68 inches and as, moreover, he
;
could not find any authority for an ancient cubit 26-488 inches long, ho
abandoned that scheme and subsequently invented a new one, which has
landed him in a totally different set of numbers.
5 1 APPENDICES. [YI.
by Henry James, whose first entry into the Pyramid

Sir
subjectwas an attack, in November, 1867, upon the book
which contained them all; the attack beginning in these
words :
"Ordnance Survey Office, Southampton,

" November 9, 1867.
" The publication of the elaborate work on the Great Pyramid of Egypt,
by Professor Piazzi Smyth, has led me to an examination of the propor-
"
tions and dimensions of this Pyramid
But although Sir Henry James may now choose to throw

Colonel Howard-Yyse and Mr. Perring's measure overboard,
— and has led both the Poyal Society and Professor Clerk
—
Maxwell unwittingly to confirm the act, the Eoyal Society
may be assured that the French nation has not abandoned
our greatest Pyramid explorer. Neither has that gallant
people forgotten their own Academicians in the most scientific
of all military expeditions. On the contrary, they cherish
the remembrance that it was their savants of the Egypto-
Prench Academy under Napoleon Bonaparte, who first dis-
covered two of the only true station points for Great
Pyramid base-side measuring, and ascertained the length of
that base-side by their measures (certainly not inferior in
care and skill to those of any one who has been there since)
to be 9,163 English inches.
Indeed, it so chances that within the last few weeks there
have been discussions in Paris, in the learned Abbe Moigno's
journal, ^'Les Mondes," as to whether, on one side, a certain
M. Bufeu was right in recently taking, as the only worthy
authorities for the Great Pyramid's base-side length, the
Napoleonic Academicians and Colonel-Howard Yyse, giving
a mean of 9,166 inches; or, on the other side, the Eoyal
Society and Sir Henry James in keeping back those mea-
sures and publishing a selection of other persons' measures
only, implying a length of no more than 9,120 inches.
But as this subject is pretty certain now to be attended
to in the interests of international justice by more able men
—
than mygelf, I hasten on to the second part of this short
paper, or to what Herodotus did really say in the passage
referred to.
VL] APPENDICES. 5 1
STATEMENT BY HERODOTUS TOUCHING THE LENGTH OF THE

EGYPTIAN CUBIT.
As regards " the

common cubit " of Egypt, says Sir Henry
James in the Proceedings of the Eoyal Society," and already
''
quoted from thence to the whole British Association, — **

we
have the statement of Herodotus that the Egyptian cubit was
equal to the Greek cubit, that of Samos."
Three years ago I had the honour of showing, before
classicists as well as scientists, that Herodotus made no such
statement about the Grreek cubit. He said that the Egyptian
cubit was equal to the cubit of Samos but Samos was not
;
Greece. It was on the contrary, for the dates referred to,

the opposite of Greece especially in the eyes of Herodotus,
;
who regarded it as Asian and Persian and the first attack

;
upon it by the Lacedaemonian Dorians, he terms their expe-

dition into Asia, words which the E-ev. Canon Eawlinson de-
clares are emphatic as to the sense in which Herodotus used
the term Samian.
In this sense also, and with its metrological application
as well (or of the Samian cubit being of the same length as
the Egyptian, viz., 20-7 inches nearly, and both of them the
same as the Babylonian of 500 B.C.), the phrase of Herodotus
was understood by Sir Isaac Newton nearly two centuries
ago also by our own chief Egjrptologist, Sir Gardner Wil-
;
kinson and likewise by the learned Babylonian scholar, Dr.

;
Brandis, of Berlin, with almost all other authorities.

Hence, unless the Eoyal Society is consenting that a
general officer of the Eoyal Engineers shall ride over both all
the facts and all the best interpreters of the facts from Sir
Isaac Newton downwards, they can hardly object to my
bringing up once again, in the interests of the world, the
most notable metrological equation of all antiquity viz., that
;
the Samian cubit, which the Egyptian cubit was said to be

equal to by '' the Father of History," was, together with the
then contemporary Asiatic cubit, =20*7 British inches in length
±0-1 inch nearly. Hence we may be absolutely certain that
the Samian cubit of Herodotus was not 18'24 British inches
long only, as was the Greek cubit and then see the unhappy
;
I)osition in which Sir Henry James has placed himself and the
Eoyal Society.
He, erroneously imagining that the Samian cubit was no
41
5 1 APPENDICES. [VI.
more than 18*24 inches long, not only freely announced, on

his own authority, the other day that the Great Pyramid
was built to have a measured length of base-side 500 =
of those cubits, 9,120 British inches; but, in order to
viz.,
show an appearance of confirmation of his idea, he actually
proceeded a second time to misrepresent the list of modern
observations of the base-side of the Grreat Pyramid, by drop-
ping out now the biggest ones and taking up only the smallest
ones and the Boyal Society has pubKshed the perverted
;
result.
REAL LENGTH OF THE GREAT PYRAMID'S BASE-SIDE.
Modern surveyors, even with the true Great Pyramid's

base station points given them to measure between, have
been lamentably wide of each other, whether they have
measured one side only, or all four, and then taken a mean
of the sides, of what every observer assumes to be a squarej.
horizontal plane.
But though wide of each other, the four chief and extreme
authorities may, I trust, be regarded as both honest and not
very far from equal to each other in ability. Whence, if the
results of different observers were
French Academicians in 1799 and 1800, on the

(1)
north side only
)
^
= o ic-^ r? -4-
y,lbd i3rit.
•
ms.
Howard-Vyse and Perring in 1837, on the north
(2)
side only
\
J
= q ^rt
y,lb«
(3) Aiton and Inglis in 1865, mean of all four sides* = 9,110 „
(4) Ordnance Surveyors in 1869, mean of all four \ o ion
"~ ^'^'^^ "
sides )
—modern science, I presume, cannot pretend to say that the

true result should be anywhere else than near the mean of
the whole.
This was the conclusion which I came to in 1867;
deducing, for reasons given in " Life and Work," 9,140 British
inches, as the real Great Pyramid original and intended
base-side length. A
length, too, which I have been enabled
to find within the last few months, is remarkably, even
brilliantly and exactly, confirmed by the mathematical rela-
* In the Aiton and Inglis individual measures of each side, the north
side appears aa 9,120 Biitish inches indicating a constant difference in
;
their measures ua compared with those cited here as 1 and 2.

TL] APPENDICES, 517
more accurate measures (chiefly taken by

tions of tlie mucli
two Professors of Astronomy, separated from each other by
230 years) of the King's Chamber, so-called, in the Great
Pyramid. But as tliat striking case is already discussed at
length in a work now at the press, I will not detain the
Society any further \îth it at the present time.
TEIE ENTRANCE PASSAGE OF THE GREAT PYRAMID.
Towards the end of his abstract-paper in the ''Royal

Society'sProceedings," Sir Henry James alludes to the
breadth of the entrance passage of the Great, as well as of
other,Pyramids but quotes only certain measures nearly forty
;
years old, and taken to no more refinement than the nearest

half-inch.
As such a proceeding misrepresents both the present-day
literature of the Great Pyramid, and its metrical capabilities
also, —
may I request that the Poyal Society will be pleased
to accept the following copy of jny measures, taken in 1865
and published in 1867,* of both the height and breadth of
the Great Pyramid's entrance-passage, at several different
points in the course of its length, and registered in all cases
to the nearest hundredth of an inch.
P. S.
lo, Royal Tekrace, Edinburgh,

October 27, 1873.
CONCLUDIXG WORDS ON JANUARY 24tH, 1874.
This morning's post has brought important news, both

public and private.
The public news is to the startling effect, that Parliament
has been suddenly dissolved. If this should prevent Govern-
ment from performing their promise of bringing in a Metrical
Bill this year, it will add yet another example to the many
previous ones, already alluded to on page 214, of such
* These measures being chiefly the same as those which appear on

page 311 of this book, need not be repeated here.
5i8 APPENDICES. -
[VI.
intended bills having again and again been broken without

Land.
The private news is a letter from the Royal Society of
London, rejecting and returning me the original MS. forming
the subject of Appendix YI., on the plea of a secret sub-
committee of their own having reported, that it was not of a
nature suited for reading before the Society.
Looking to the errors and something worse of the previous
antagonist paper from the Southampton Office, which wm
thought suitable by the officers of the Society to be read, and
honourably printed too, first in the Society's "Proceedings"
—
and afterwards in its "Transactions," and comparing them
with the simple contents of this plain paper in reply, which
the secret committee (the Star-chamber of the Society) will
not allow, for suitability s sake, to be read nor to appear in
—
any way before the meetings, the general public may form
their own conclusions,
1. As to whether the Eoyal Society really desires its pub-
lications, in matters relating to the science of the Great
Pyramid, to represent " accurate measuring, truth-stating, and
justice doing " or, the exact opposite of those things ? And,
;
2. How far modern science by itself alone, ruling in high
places of the earth, is likely to satisfy the hopes of perishing

humanity through all time to come ?
INDEX,
Astronomical law with regard to the

Great Pyramid, 313
ABD-ALLATIF, an Arabian author ,, Orientation, popular ideas of, 59, 60
on the Great Pyramid. 356 Astronomy of the entrance passage, 312
Abel and Cain, contest between, 10 Athenaeum, 6, 23, 40, 513
Absolute temperature in the King's Austrian Meteorological Society, 170
Chamber of Great i'yxamid, 168 Authorities for the names of the buildera
Acts, 328, 440 of the three pyramids, 428
Adams, John Quincey, 199, 233, 449 Authors, variety o^ and their measures,
Adderley, Mr., on bushels, 203 16
Age of exploration, 381
Agnew, H. C, "Letters on the Pyra- B
mids," 94
Air channels, 348—352 Baily, Francis, 119, 161—163, 168, 175, 20G,
Air channels, discovered by Col. Howard- 207
Vyse, 93 Baird, Sir David, 97
Air channels in Queen's Chamber, 363— Barnard, President, 44, 446, 450-455
365 Barometric pressure, 266
Airy, Sir G. B., 38, 63, 160, 163, 210, Base-side lengths, 31, 32, 511, 512
372 „ measures by French Academicians
Alton and Inglis, 32, 178, 393, 513, and Howard Vyse, 20, 516
516 ,, original, not present, size, required
Al-Mamoun, Caliph, 79-82, 86—88, 92, to test John Taylor's proposition,
307, 351, 356, 357, 380, 422, 462 17
American " Joiunal of Science and Art," „ variations of measures of, 33, 516
361, 362 ^Beginning of reference to the Great
Amos, 434 Pyramid's numbers, 35
Angle measures, 26, 27, 269 Biblical views of Metrology in general,
Angle of rise of Great Pyramid, 26 435
Anglo-Saxon chaldron, 228 Biblical w
eek, 376—378
„ com measure, 108 Birch, Dr. Samuel, 6, 309, 408, 416, 416
„ ignorance of granite, 112 Birch, Dr. Thomas, M.A. (of 1737), 850
„ race, 37 Bird's copy of Exchequer yard standard,
Anomalies corrected by Great Pyramid 247
system, 265 Bonaparte, 16, 65, 101, 188
Antagonist of the Great Pyramid theory, Boss on the granite leaf, 190
193 Bramah, 161
Ante-chamber, measures of the, 186 Brandis, Dr., 288, 615
„ symbolisms, 14G, 186 Brettell, Mr. (C.E.), 23
"Antiquities Description," 20 British Association, 121, 511, 512
Antiquity of intellectual man, 145, 175, British Government, weights and meo-
242 Bui es, 450
Apology for the errors of earlier ob- British inch, 36, 37, 247
servers, 21 „ Metrology, 199
Arabs stopped up ventilating channels, Brugsch Bey, 408, 416
171 Briinnow, Dr., calculation of stars in the
Architectural facts of the Great Pyramid, Pleiades, 325, 326
209, 210 Bryant, 421
Armstrong, Sir "W., 245 Brougliam, Lord, 226
Arris lities, careful measure of, 26 Bunsen, Baron, 412, 418
Arthur's Seat, Ordnance Suivey experi- Buri*ctinu8, dcsoription of the limestone
ment on, 159, 163 in the Qroat Fyrtuuid passage*! 8Utt
520 INDEX.
Coventry, Andrew, 375
Crucial test, 390—402
Capacity measures, tables of, 229, 230 Cubit, Greek, 33, 515
„ references in the Queen's Chamber, „ hereditary measures of the, 252, 253
185 „ lengths, by Sir G. Wilkinson, 289
„ relations between King's Chamber „ of Egypt, 36, 515, 516
and coffer, 183 „ of Great Pyramid, 36
Cartouches of King Cheops foimd in „ of Memphis, 299
Wadee Maghara, 111 „ of Persia, 288
Casey, Mr., 176, 384, 385, 390, 391, 393, „ of Samos, 286, 287, 515
394, 396, 398 „ old Egyptian, 285
Casing-stone, Mr. Dixon's, 489 493 — ,, origination of the profane Eastern,
Casing-stones, Howard-Vyse's, 22 291
„ Howard-Vyse's, found large, 25 „ sacred, 36
„ search for, 16, 17 „ sacred, by Sir Isaac Newton, 295,
„ Dixon's search in Cairo for, 17 298 — 302
,, Sir J. Herschel's angle of the, „ sacred, of the Hebrews, 281, 294
23 Cubits, Dr. Hincks on, 288
„ Howard-Vyse's angle of sup- „ of ancient renown, 282
ports, J. Taylor's proposition, Cumberland, Bishop, 294
24
Catalogue of the Boulak museum, 415
Cavendish, Mr., 160, 162, 165
Caviglia, Signor, 75, 78, 381
Davies, Prof. C, 449;
Ceiling of King's Chamber, 352—355
Davison's chamber, 354
Celsius, 258
Challenger, H.M.S., letters from, 213
Date of Great Pyramid, 313, 316
Chalmers, Dr., 219 Day, Mr., 176
Champollion, 407, 408 „ on the area of the Pyramid's right
section, 13
Cheop's coffin 144!
Chisholm, Mr., 207, 208 „ on the excentric position of the

boss, 192
Christison, Sir R., 252
Chronicles, 431, 436 „ on the shape of the coffer, 368
Chronology, essence of, 34

Day and year standard indicated in the
Clarke, Dr., 97, 113, 148, 307, 381
Pyramid, 29
„ standard of lineal measure at the
Clarke, Colonel Ross, 44, 159, 372
Great Pyramid, 36
Classic antiquity on the interior of the " Dead Book" of tlie Egyptians, 290, 291
Great Pyramid, 78
Defterdar Bey, 20
„ names for early Egsrptian kings, De Launay, M., 50
426
Cobden, Mr,, 211, 212 De Morgan, Prof., 175
Density and temperature, 146
Cocker, Mr., 233
Coffer, capacity of the, 143
De Saulcey, 408
Deuteronomy, 435
„ capacity size by Joseph Jopling,
Differential chronology of the Egyptolo-
125
gists, 410—413.
„ capacity size by John Taylor, 123 «
Diodorus Siculus, 91, 426, 430
„ contents of pure water, 231
Director of the Ordnance Survey, mis-
„ cubic contents, 145 reads a passage in Herodotus, 28G
„ determination ofcapacity by Greaves of the Ordnance Survey on the
,,
and Vyse, 106
Egyptian cubit, 285
„ drawing in the French work on Divine inspiration, 31
Egypt of the, 131
Dixon, Mr. John, 155, 156, 364
„ ledge, anomaly of the, 130
„ measured in British inches, 134
„ Mr. Waynman, 16, 20, 134, 135, 144,
155, 191, 359, 363, 365, 366, 394,
141
395, 399, 401, 497, 498
„ often measured, 99
,, Mr. Waynman, great measuring
„ Perring's drawings of the, 131, 133
work in first ascending passage,
„ sarcophagus theory of the, 141— 366
143
,, Mr. Waynman, made cast of boss,
„ Taylor's suggested use of the, 118
191
,, weight, temperature, and pressure
data for the, 172, 173 ,, Mr. Waynman, measures by, 395
„ Mr. Waynman, on air-channels in
„ why of that size, 118
Queen's Chamber, 363—365
Coloured Pyramid, 116
Commensui abilities in the Pyramid, „ Mr. Waynman, requested to make
special measures, 394
151—153
Dufeu, M., 126, 127, 514
Communistic French metre, progress of
the, 446
Confirmations, 174 176 —
Corner-sockets, discovery of, 20
., measurements of the, 29 Earth and Pyramid analogies bv John
Cory, J. P., *' Fragments," by, 424, 431, 432 Taylor, 40
INDEX. 521
Earth-axis and year, commensurable French Academicians, 121, 1.S6, 188, 305
result indicated, 34 Academicians base-side length, 31,
Earthquakes unusual in Egypt, 16 515, 516
Earth's density, closely appi-oximated to, Academicians made first socket
371—373 measure, 22
„ equatorial diameter, 31 and Howard-Vyse base-side mea-
„ mean density, 157 sures, 20, 512—516
,, mean density. Captain R. Clarke's Metre, 37
result for, 372 Metre's derivation, 38
„ mean density, mountain determina- Metric System, 37, 38
tion of the, 158 metrical reference for capacity
,, mean density, natural philosophy measure, 119
determination of the, 160 • metrical system, 217
., mean density, Sir G. B. Airy's result metrical temperature and pressure,
for the, 372 261, 262
„ Polar-axis, latest determination of, observed depth and height of the
43 coffer, 132
Edinburgh astronomical observations, philosophers' metrological scheme,
284, 287,512 37, 38
Egmont, Lord, 149 savants on the passages of the Great
Egypt of the Lord Christ, 4a3 Pyramid, 305
Egyptian cubit, length of the profane, 28, Further confirmations of J. Taylor's
36, 37, 515, 516 proposition, 25
„ dynasties, table of, 412
„ hieroglyphics versvs Greek scholar-
ship, 408
Egypto-Arabians held the Pyramids in
esteem, 80 Galloway, Rev. W. B., " Esrypt's Record
„ -French Academy of 1799, 132, 514 of Time," 388, 410
Egyptologic details of early kinjs, 424 „ Rev. W. B., on Egyptian kings'
—426 names, 426
Egyptologists' date of Great Pjrramid, Gteneral summation, secular and sacred,
315, 316 460
,, ideas of pyramids, 75, 76 Genesis, 334, 433, 464
,, portcullis system, 153 Geodesic science, growth of, 38
Engineer-general, questionable theories „ knowledge of at the Great
science,
of an, 155, 156 Pyramid, 39
,
, officers employed on trigonometrical Geogrraphical aptitudes of the Great
surveys, 42 Pyramid, 65
Enquiry into the data, 14 Gteography and the exterior, 1
Entrance passage of the Great Pyramid, Geometrical derivation of the passage
517 angle, 188, 189
Ephesians, 440 „ proportions of the Great Pyramid,
Equal surface projection, 68, 265, 266 12,13
Equality of areas, 181 Gibbon's accoimt of Al Mamoim, 79
Equatorial and other diameters of the Gibson, Mr. Mihier, 212
earth, 45 Gliddon, Mr., 59, 97, 333
Eratosthenes, 426 Glover, Rev., F.R.A., 176, 373, 438
European mind enters into the question Goodsir, Rev. J. T., 176, 290, 347
of the Great Pyramid, 90 Graham, standards compared by, 24.8
Exchequer standard ell, 248 Grand gallery's cubical commensura-
iixodus, 333, 338, 4M, 473 bilities, 378, 379
Ewart, Mr., 212, 214, 221 Grander Pyramid and Solar Analogy, 48
Ezekiel, 280, 435, 442 Granite, ancient and modem ignorance
of, 113—116
„ leaf, 154
„ leaf,place of the bos* on the, 191
„ the material of the coffer, 109
Fahrenheit's thermometer, 257 „ where used in the Great Pyramid,
Fallings away from simple fact, 472 117
Fergusson, James, 64, 412, 427, 505—510 Grant, Dr., of Cairo, 16, 134, 497, 498
Fiffure of the earth and sun distance, 40 „ Dr., of Cairo, assists Mr. Dixon at
First discovery of John Taylor's, 12, 14 the Pyramid, 363, 366, 396
Foot measures, 254 „ Dr., of Cairo, on Mariette Bey's
„ of man, size of, 27 wonderful stone, 416, 416
,, standard unsuitable for w on the ,
Dr., of Cairo, on some crucial points
,
Pyramid's scale, 27 in the Great Pyramid, 493, 496

Forbes, Professor J. D., 162 Great Pyramid, alleged error of its orien-
„ Mr., travels (in 1776), 114 tation, 60
Fox Talbot, Mr., 28;^ „ all the other pyramids unlike the,
Freemasons' inarks, 128 69
„ on the origin of the coffer, 128 „ Al Mamoun at the, 81—
522 INDEX.
Great Pyramid, always the favourite one, Prof., on the wall courses in
80 King's Chamber, 147
„ an anthropological monument, 47 „ the Oxford astronomer (in 1637),
,, an effective surveying signal, 65 103—106
„ architectural facts, 509, 510 Greek cubit, 33, 515
,, before science, 53 Gregory, Dr. Olinthus, 14
„ comer-sockets, uncovering all four, Grey, Sir George, 208
32
„ directors of the building were not
Egyptian, 69
„ earth's density number in the, 164
„ expresses the value of ir, 26 Haliburton, R. G. on the Pleiades, 321
„ free from aU idolatrous inscriptions, Saroun al Raschid, 79, 82
5 Harrison, Dr., 440
„ geographical indications in the, 55 Harvey, Dr., 348, 349, 350
„ geographical position, a testimony Heat and pressure, 257
against some earth theories, 62 Heat, angle, money, time, 257—277
„ grand standards, 224 Hebiew measures, Bishop Cumberland
„ height of, 49 on, 294
„ history and the interior, 71 Hekekyan Bey, 126—128
„ latitude of the, 61 Hereditary inch measures, 255
„ linear standard contrasted with Herodotus, 6, 9, 19, 49, 78, 92, 104, 287,
French metre, 37 288, 345, 391, 4-26-430, 437, 512, 514
„ made of a particular size, 34 Herschel, Sir John, 23, 175, 297, 324
„ meridian, 67, 68 „ advocates the inch as the unit stan-
„ metrology of time, 276, 277 dard, 220—223
„ Mr. Heniy Mitchell on the position „ confirmed J. Taylor's earth and
of the, 65, 66 Pyramid analogies, 40, 41
„ no Freemasons' marks in or on the, „ on the astronomical law with regard
129 to the Pyramid, 313-316
„ non-idolatrous, 64 „ on the diameter rather than the
„ not of Egypt, 8, 9 circumference of a circle, 38
„ number of wall courses in the ,, on weights and measures, 220, 221
King's Chamber of the, 149 Hierologists and chronologists, 405—408
„ orientation of, opposed by all early Hincks, Dr., 419, 420
structures, 64 Hine, Edward, 484
„ orientation of the sides of the, 55 Hipparchus, 320
,, position as described in Isaiah xix., History and the interior of the Great
20, 67 Pyramid, 71
„ position in the delta land of Egypt, Hooke, Dr., 57, 58, 61
65 Hopkins, Mr. Evan, on earth's motion,
,, present appearance of the, 16 62
„ quasi-copies of the, 7 Human religious history, 389, 390
„ scenes transacted in the, 171 Human versus divine ultimate rule, 456
„ scientific knowledge of the, 11 Hume, Joseph, 372
„ shape of the, 49 Hutton, 159
,, subterranean chamber of the, 74
„ use of a polar star by the, 316
318
,, versus rude stone monuments, 505, Ibn Abd Alkokm, 81
510 Inches typified in the granite leaf, 189
„ why was it built, and who built it ? IngUs, Mr., 150, 513
9,10 International appendix to Great Py-
„ Sphinx consigned to its proper ramid capacity measure, 229
place, 413—417 no community
; ,, linear measure, 252, 253
between it and the Great Pyra- ,, weight measure, 242
mid, 357 Intellectual man, antiquity of, 145, 175,
Greaves, Prof., 16, 57, 102, 127, 299, 307, 242
309, 353 Introductory statement touching the
,
, con\ ersation with Dr. Harvey, 348— Great Pyramid, 3
350 Iron measuring-rod of Prof. Greaves, 177
i „ description of the passages, 306, Isaiah, 2, 198, 373, 404, 443, 470, 480, 481,
308 510
'
„ figurative expression misled Jo-
mard, 177
,, first named the granite leaf, 154
„ his useful work at the Great Pyra-
mid, 58 James, Sir H., 32, 49, 159, 372, 511—515,
„ on the bxiilder of the Great Pjrra- 517
mid, 91 Jeezeh, its varieties of orthography, 4
„ on the nature of the stone of the , Jeremiah, p. vi.
coffer. 111 I
Jerusalem, when founded, 432
INDEX. %n
Job, Book of, 72, 334, 336, 373, 437, 438, Lindsay, Lord, on the wall courses in the
470 King's Chamber, 148
Jomard, M., 19, 56, 95, 96, 132, 133, 169, Linear and superficial measure, 244
170, 177, 305, 353 „ relations between the coffer and
Jopling, Joseph, 125 King's Chamber, 182
Josephus, 292, 293, 29S, 338, 342, 493 Lives of the Kings, 429
Joseph Well, city of Cairo, 169 Louis Napoleon, 216
" Juventus Mundi," 425, 428 Luke, St., 440
M
Kamak, double cubit 509
of, 124, Macdonald of Aberdeen, 114
KeUy, Dr., 200, 205, 215, 229, 253 MacKay, Rev. Dr., 176
Kepler, 51 Magna Charta, 199, 200
Key signs of the Great Pyramid's archi- Maitland, Ken mure, 387
tect, 356 Manetho, 6, 104, 333, 409, 412, 424, 428.
Khedive, his highness the, 481 431, 432
King Charles I.'s astronomer, 308 Mariette Bey, 383, 408, 412, 414r-416
King, Mr. Clarence, on atmospheric Mark, St., 440
pressure, 263, 264 Martin, W., 457
Kmg's Chamber and coffer mutually Maskelyne, Dr., 158, 169
commensurable, 150 Mason di, account of the Great Pyramid
„ its temperature, 168 by, 89
„ measures, 178, 182 Masonry of first ascending passage. 366
Kings, 341, 436 Matthew, St., 440, 442
Kitto, 294, 338 Maxwell, Prof. Clerk, 511, 514
Mean temperature of the habitable earth.
266, 267
La Caille, 51 Measures of boss on granite leaf, 192
Land and sea miles, 270 „ of casing-stone, by Mr. Brettell,
Lane, Mr., 148, 178, 412
Latitude, further test by, 61 „ of coffer to be accepted or declined,
Law, H., 14 102, 103
Law of Egyptian pyramid building, 76 „ of stone circles, by James Fergus-
Layard, Mr., on Fieemasons' marks, 128 son, 507, 508
Legend on the Pyramid of Dashoor, 352 „ tested for accuracy, 395, 396
Loider's, Dr., supposed pyramid, 497 Mechanical data, 348—352
Length and breadth of the Ark of the Mediaeval Arabian learning on the in-
Covenant, 337 terior of the Great I'yramid, 79
„ and breadth of the coffer, 134, 135 Melchizedek, 433, 463
"„ in Britisli inches of hereditary Mencheres built the Third Pyramid, 418
measures, 252—256 „ the codifier of gods for his country-
„ measure by Prof. Greaves of the men, 425
coffer, 105 Mensuration data at the disposal of the
„ measures of the coffer, 100, 136—141, New Theorists, 177
145 Mental accomi>animent8 of several fsiots,
„ of the ante-chamber, 186—188 68,69
„ of the base-side of the Great Py- Menzies, Robert, 387—390
ramid, 31—33, 331 Metric system, by President Barnard,
„ of the earth's polar axis, 41 44 — 44,460
„ of the Egyptian cubit, 36, 515, 516 „ by Professor 0. Davies, 449
„ ofthe King's Chamber, 177—182, 475 Michaelis, 337, 436, 436
—478 Mina, or stone ball weight, disoussion on.
of the Queen's Chamber, 185
„ 364
standard of, employed in the Great
„ Missing ramp stone, 382
Pyramid, 27 Mitchell, R§v. John, 160
„ true base-side, 17, 21 5, Henry, U.S., 66, 66, 67, 176
„ varieties of measures of, 32, 33 Mixed presence of two cubits, sacred and
Lepsius, Dr., 6, 76—79, 97. 142, 391, 408, profiane, 298
411—413, 468 Modem astronomers proving the sun
"Les Mondes," 187, 486, 614 distance could not have been moasiu'ed
Letronne, 97 in the age of the Groat 1'yr.tmid, 61
'"Letters on the Pyramids," by H. C. Modem measures of the coffer, lOO
Agnew, 94 „ measures of the passages, aiu
Le Verrier, M., 60, 167 ,, promiscuous quarrying, 366
Leviticus, 436 Moigno, Abb6, 187, 484, 614
Lewis, Sir G. C, vtnxu Egyptologists, Mokattam limestone, 116
408, 409 Money, 270, 271
•'
Lite and Work," 26, 32, 60, 149, 176, 270, Moses and the wisdom of the EffyptiMM^
295, 327, 369, 374, 377, 888, 892, 897— 828—330
401, 463, 476, 618, 516 Mosque of Sooltaa Hassan, 16
524 INDEX.
Mummies of the Old Empire have not Passages, modem measures of the, 310—
come do-wn
to our age, 418 312
Mummy of recent date, part of it found „ of the Great Pyramid, description
in Third Pyramid, 419 of the, 306—310
Murray's Handbook for Egypt, 332, 356 Paucton, M., 435
Murtedi, an Arabian author, 307 " Penny Cyclopaedia," 204, 226
Pentateuch, 334
Perigal, Mr. Henry, 143
N Perring, Mr., 24, 131, 191, 346, 359, 360,
382, 512, 514, 516
Names of the builders of the three largest Persian invasion, 74
Jeezeh Pyramids, 428 Peter, St., 440, 442
Napoleon Bonaparte, 101, 188, 514 Petrie, Mr. F., 150, 176, 180
New hierologists, 407 „ W., 48, 49, 50, 173, 369, 371
New policy^ Old Egypt, 480 Philitis, 384—387, 430-432, 442, 463
New school of Pyramia theorists, 176 Philosophical Society, Glasgow, metrolo-
New Testament allusions to the Great gical discussion at the, 236
Pyramid, 440 Physical science at the Great Pyramid,
New theorists, mensuration data at the 468
disposal of the, 177 Pin-ch-un, a learned Chinese envoy, 6
Newton, Sir Isaac, 30, 96, 158, 220, 295— Playfair, Prof., 60, 159
299, 337, 339, 340, 472, 515 Pleiades year, 318—327
Niebuhr, 351 Pliny, 19, 78, 111
Non-Egyptian character of the Great Pocock, Dr., on the wall courses in King's
Pyramid, 9 Chamber, 148
Norden, Captain, 351 Poets of El Kahireh, 88
Normal clock of Paris Observatory, 167 Poole, Mr., 77
„ of Pulkova Observatory, 167 Popular ideas of astronomical orienta-
Norris, Dr., 283 tion, 59
Notes on Egypt, by T, Sopwith, 126, 302 Porphyry, Egyptian quarries of, 110
„ on the Great Pyramid, by Sir H. Possibility of azimuthal change in the
James, 32 earth's crust, 56
Nouet, M., observations to test the Pratt, Archdeacon, 458 y
orientation of the Great Pyramid, 56 Precession of the equinoxes, 273, 319
Numbers for the vertical height of the Primeval Shemite shepherds, 422, 423
Great Pyramid, 25 Probable error statements in modem
Numerous abstracts by Howard- Vyse, 15 scientific work, 163
Proverbs, 435
Psalms, 485
Ptolemy, 102
Pulkova Observatory, on temperature,
Objections, beginnings of, 18 166
Objector, first. 19 Pyramid, and British, capacity measures,
„ second, 20 229
Observed temperatures at or near the „ and early English inch compared,
Great Pyramid, 169, 170 248
O'Farrell, Mr., 49 „ arithmetic, 225
Of the number five, 330 ,, capacity —
measure, 225 230
Opinion of Brugsch Bey on Mariette's „ coffer, 99
wonderful stone, 417 „ explanation of the word, 98
Oppert, M., on the Babylonian cubit, 288 „ inch, 35
Ordnance officers, attempt to turn the „ of Dashoor, spoliation of, 20
Pyramid cubit into ridicule, 47 „ researches by John Taylor, 296,
survey of Great Britain, 512
., 297, 300
„ surveyors, 516 Pyramid stm-distance, 49
Orientation of Chaldean buildings, 64 „ theorems by Mr. J. Simpson, 368
„ of Great Pyramid, 60 373, 375
„ of the sides of the Great Pyramid, „ weight measure, 231, 255
55 Pyramids and the Pentateuch, 344
Origines of the Anglo-Saxon race, 37 „ of Egypt, the ancient, 2
Osburn, W,, 283, 408, 412, 413, 416, 418,
432
*'
Otia-CEgyptiaca," by G. R. Gliddon, 59
Qualities of the coffer's "quarter" mea-

sure, 107 rks,
Quarry ma' or 6
Parliamentary reports on 'standards, " Quarter,' the corn measure, 98
206—217 " Quarterly Journal of Science" for Octo-
Parties to the final contest, 454 ber, 1873, 127
Passage, astronomy of the entrance, 312 —
Queen's Chamber, air channels, 363 366
318 „ measures in, 359—362
INDEX. 5^5
Queen's Chamber, uses of, 359 Scriptural allusions [conXinvjtd) :
Uueipo's, Don Vincent, metrology, 288 Kings, 341, 436

Chronicles, 341, 436
Job, 72, 334, 335, 373, 437, 438, 470
R Psalms, 485
Proverbs, 435
Ramp-stone, who knocked it out of its Isaiah, 2, 198, 373, 404, 443, 470, 480, 481,
phice, 382—384 510
Ramps and the well's mouth, 379 382 — Jeremiah, p. vi.
Rawlinson, Canon, 64, 287, 412, 427, 429, Ezekiel. 280, 435, 442
431,515 Amos, 434
Real length of the Great Pyramid's base- Zechariah, 439, 485
side, 516 St. Matthew, 440, 442
Reaumur, 258 St. Mark, 440
Recent discovery at the Sphinx, 414 417 — St. Luke, 440
Reflections on the numbers as measured, Romans, p. iii.
101 Ephesians, 440
Reich, Prof., of Freyberg, 161 St. Peter, 440, 442
Relations of King's Chamber to coffer, Revelation, 450
367—371 Secret sign in Great Pyramid, 358
" ReUgions of the World," by W. Os- Seven homilies by Rev. J. T. Goodsir, 290
bum, 347 Shape of Great Pyramid independently
Representative antagonist of Pyramid discovei ed, 49
Theory, 193 Sharpe, Mr. Samuel, 428
Researches at the Jeezeh Pyramids by Shaw. Dr., 149
Howard- Vyse, 75 Sheddsxd Ben Ad, 80
Revelation, 450 Sheepshanks, Rev. R., 160
Richardson, Dr., 148 Shepherd Kings, 418—422
Rigaud, Prof., 354 „ Bryant on the, 421
Rigid inqmry into the base-side length of „ Osbum on the, 420, 432
Great Pyramid, 31 „ Vyse's reasonings on the, 420—422
Romans, p. iii. Shuckburgh, 246
Roscoe, Mr., 261 Sidebotham,- Mr. Joseph, 133
Rossellini, M., 408 Sidereal day, 274
Rotation of earth's axis, 30 Silliman's American " Jom-nal of Science
PkOyalObservatory of Edinburgh, its and Art," 186
rock thermometers, 167 Simms, Mr., 161
„ Society of Edinburgh, fragments of Simpson, Mr. J., 176, 179, 180—185, 368,
casing-stones deposited at the, 26 370—375, 378, 379, 475, 499—504
„ Society of London, 51 1—513, 514 Sinai Survey, Royal Engineers returning
Rubbish moimds at the Great Pyramid, from, 32
25 Slaveholders possess Egypt, 482, 483
Rude stone monuments versus the Great Smith, Mr. Benjamin, 214
Pyramid, 505—510 Smith, Prof. H. L„ 176, 180, 185, 861, 362,
868, 370, 468
Social crisis in Englanl, 457
Solar day, 275, 276
Solomon's molten sea, 340—343, 500
Sacred Ark of the Covenant, 337—340 Sopwith, Mr., 126, :W9
,, in time as well as sp ice, 300 Specific gravities, 240, 241
,, pronounced to be Messianic, 386 „ gravit.-, 235
388 „ standard of Pyramid weight men-
„ touching the Great Pyramid, 384— sure, 241
386 Speculations on the Metrology of the
Samos, island of, 287 Great Pyramid by Sir J. Newton, 96
Sandys, Georg ., 9'J Squaring of the circle, 13, 26
Saurid Ibn Salhouk, 80, 81 Standard measures, names of, 283
Havile, Rev. B. Wrey, 62, 63 „ of length employed in Great Pyra-
Saxon metrology, 233, 484 mid, 27
Sohihallion, Mount. 158 Standards Commission, 219
Schubert, M. de, 38 Stanley, Dciua, and the Sphinx, 414
Science not the Great Pyramid's final Statement by Herodotus touching the
object, 47 length of the Egyptian cubit, 516, 616
Scientific references for capacity mea- Stewart, Professor Balfour, 406
sure, 118 Stone circles, measures of, by Jumoa
Scottish Covenanters' phrase, 172 Fcrgusson, 607, 608
Scrip' ural allusions : Stonenenge, summer solstice is now at, 62
Genesis, 334, 433, 4<54 Stone prepared without liands, 463
Kxodus, 333, 338, 434, 473 „ structures and pyramids, 348—847
Leviticus, 435 Strabo, 19, 78, 426
Deuteronomy, 435 Structural isolation of the Qreat Pyim-
Pentateuch, 334 mid, 78
5^6 INDEX.
Struve, M. Otto, 166

Sttikely, Dr., 509
8un-distance as Bupposed at different Unexplained feature in the Queen's
ages of the world, 51 Chamber air-channels, 365
„ Great Pyramid, 50 Universal metrology, 444
„ MM. Le Verrier and Delaunay on Useful factors in calculation, 14
the, 50 Uses of the Queen's Chamber, 359—3
Survey of Great Britain, scale of map of,
250—252
Symbolic hints from the ante-chamber,
153
System, Great PjTamid's metrological, Variety of authors and their measures,
276 16
Venetian, M., description of granite, 112
Venus, Sim-transit preparations for, 51,
Table of capacity, corn measures, 229, 230 52
„ dynasty of ancient E^pt, 412 Virgil, the Pleiades in the days of, 319,
„ earth's size in P3Tamid inches, 45 320
„ Great Pyramid length measure, 249 Vyse, Col. Howard-, 5, 6. 15—22, 24, 26,
„ measures of the Pyramid's coffer, 29, 32, 78, 90, 93, 94, 97, 99, 102, 103,
100 106, 131, 171, 178, 191, 286, 307, 313,
f „ Pyramid and British linear mea- 316, 346, 356, 379, 382, 413, 419, 422,
sure, 249, 252—255 461, 512, 514, 516
„ Pyramid weight measure, 232
„ specific gravities, 240
„ system of angle measures, 269 W
„ temperatures, 268
„ the Pyramids of Egypt, 413 Wagner, M., of Pulkova, 166
„ weight measure, 232, 235 Wall courses of King's Chamber, descrip-
Tables of coffer measures, 135 141 — tions of, 147—149
„ measures from "Life and Work," Wallace, Dr., analysis of Pyramid mor-
397—402 tar, 364
„ Professor H. L. Smith's measures, Warden of the standards, 32, 285, 451
369—370 Weales, Mr., 256
the suras of the squares, 178 181
., — Wealth, the number of the beast, by
Talbot, Mr. Eox, 283 John Taylor, 209
Taylor, John, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 18, 21, 24, Weights and measures derived from the
25, 27, 35, 38, 39, 40, 46, 49, 97, 98, 108, Great Pyramid, 39
109, 118, 123, 124, 143, 175, 209, 224, 229, Wellington, Duke of, 102
247, 297, 341, 436, 437, 442 What standards would suit ir on the
Temperature and density, 146 scale of the Great Pyramid, 28
„ corrections, 164—168 What the ancients knew of the interior
Temperatures and pressures in weighing, of the Great Pyramid, 73
239 Whewell, Dr., 160
„in Pyramid thermometer degrees, Wild, Mr. James, pyramid construction
268 discovered by, 77
Test, crurial, 390 Wilde, Sir W., on the wall courses in the
"ThaHa," by Herodotus, 287 King's Chamber, 148
The right man at last, 430 Wilkinson, Sir Gardner, 16, 59, 83, 95,
T lermo-dynamics, 257 289, 332, 356, 364, 382, 408, 427, 428,
Thermometers, 257—260 468, 514
Time, duration of, 271 Wilson, John, 484
„ measures in the Great Pyramid, 304 Wingate, Mr., 233
„ sacred and prophetic, 374 376 — Woolhouse's weights and measures, 256
„ unlimited divisibility of, 271 World's surface constant to the cardinal
Times on our weights and measures, 211 directions, 63
Tombic theory, 92
„ M. Jomard on the, 96
,, receives a shake, 95
Tompkins, Henry, 344
Tracey, Captain, 176, 187, 190, 192 Yard unit, 246
Transcendentalisms of the Great Pyramid Young, Dr., 203, 205
astronomy, 321—327
Trial of hypothesis of Mr, Casey, 396—
398
Troughton, 246
True primeval astronomical orientation, Zechariah, 439. 485
64 Zodiacs, Egyptian, 405, 407
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(ft

THE GREAT PYRAMID

C^'^PIAZZI SMYTH, F.R.S.E., f.r.a.s.

"because that which may bk known of god is manifest in them;

Romans i., 19, 20

W. ISBISTER & CO.

(departed JULY, 1864)

WHY WAS AND WHO

THIS FURTHER ATTEMPT TO APPLY ACTUAL

MOST MOMENTOUS THEORY,

AND MOST PRECIOUS DISCOVERY OF THE AGE FOR ALL MANKIND

THE FRIEND OF HIS FEW LAST YEARS,

BUT ADMIRER OF ALL HIS LONG AND EARNEST CHRISTIAN LIFE,

AN3 WONDERS IN THE LAND OF EGYPT, EVKN UNTO THIS DAY."

TX7HEN the late worthy John Taylor, of Gower Street,

London (originally of Bakewell, Derbyshire) pub-

and afterwards, in 1864, his smaller pamphlet which

nobler, more important pathway to light than that

study had ever enjoyed before.

sional occupations, that I felt it something like a public

duty to examine into the foundation of Mr. Taylor's

the findings so arrived at. Findings, in many points

confirmatory of the principal thread of Mr. Taylor's

data required for solid investigation ; and which data

place could hope to supply.

How, when no one else would volunteer, for the

sake of Great Pyramid knowledge alone, and only one

(£50) towards the expenses, —how, I say, my Wife

soon after Mr. Taylor's death, through four months of

far more accuracy than had ever been attempted before,

and others descending to numerous details unnoticed

by former observers, — all this was described by me,

April, 1866 ; and afterwards (in 1867) at much more

issue, and the only means for solving it : especially

as against the modern hieroglyphic scholars ; who,

* Andrew Coventry, Esq., of 27, Moray Place, Edinburgh.

t Pages 1,653; plateaSG. PublisJ.ei by Edmonston & Douglas, Edinburgh.

whatever their learning may be concerning other Egyp-

examine the Great Pyramid in the manner now

ignorant of its mathematical proportions and mecha-

data of scientific measure, when collected by others

all histor}^, was yet prophetically intended to subserve

a high purpose for these days in which we live and the

of them in their successive ages; but that it is able

nevertheless to tell its own story and explain its mission

of TRodern times : a means fore-ordained both for pre-

venting the parable being read too soon in the history

This spread of purely-obtained Great Pyramid infor-

intellectualists into the field ; and tliey have, during

vations at the place to Mr. Taylors theory, with a

that the matter has now completely outgrown its first

book, and produced this publication as the best answer

the very name of Pyramid written down in Scripture,

that there is a great deal about the Bible subject, in the

"^locument in the history of the human race ; while the

meaning shapes we see them in now, was absolutely

which it was destined to bear indubitable witness in